Board Software

For software, I found ASRock had forgotten to send me a driver disc. I had to go to the website to download it all. Unfortunately, the download speeds for me were very slow, and it took me over four hours to download all the software. I was so eager to get things going, excited by what I saw looking the board over and butting it up for the first time, but I was stuck waiting for driver and software downloads once I had Windows 7 installed. Part of the reason it took so long was due to the sheer number of things included, some of which, like their antivirus tool, are very user-specific. Of course, this board is really about overclocking, and ASRock has, with that in mind, updated the software package that comes with the Z77 OC Formula a little bit. First of all, the new tweaking utility is named Formula Drive, and it features a skin that closely resembles the packaging.


Like with previous ASRock tweaking tools, I found the XFast Ram and fan-tuning options here, as well as access to voltage and clock options for a bit of Windows-level overclocking.


The tool for managing the extra VRM phases is here as well, with IES forming the main interface for enabling or disabling profiles dictating how all the phases get used. New with the ASRock Z77 OC Formula is the addition of the Thermal Sensor tool, a nice little interface that lists no less than 15 different temperatures around the board, which gives you a really good picture of how the board is doing, in all areas. There is also another tweaking tool, called Timing Configurator, which, as you might have guessed, is for setting memory timings, all of which, except for CAS latency, can be set in real-time and without a reboot.

When it comes to overclocking, ASRock has made sure to equip the Z77 OC Formula with everything you might need, and a normal user that likes to run 14/7 with lower clocks will also find everything they need here, making for one big, huge package that cannot be ignored. All of the other XFast 555 tools, like XFast USB and XFast Lan, are included as well, but I don't have screenshots here because showing the same tools over and over again is rather redundant.