Can anybody recommend me a Z77 motherboard that's suitable for reasonable overclocking and is under £120 plus has 4 or more SATA III 6Gbps ports? I was originally going to go for a ASRock OC Formula, but I've since realised that it's not worth paying £200+ for a board just because it has 6 SATA III ports and I can easily buy one with 6+ SATA III ports when they're a lot cheaper. (If you're wondering why I need so many, it's because I'll be starting work on a HTPC project in 2 weeks time and I hope to get it completed by Good Friday at the latest although I'll be starting work on painting the case that I bought recently with my cousin this weekend)
ASRock Z77 Extreme 4 is worth a look http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asro...-s-sata-raid-pcie-30-(x16)-d-sub-dvi-d-hdmi-a
One thing worth mentioning is only 2 SATA 6Gbps will come from the chipset so the rest will be added with the use of third party controllers so they won't be anywhere near as fast as the Intel 6Gbps ports and can even be slower than the 3Gbps ports in some cases.
I never knew that about the non-Intel 6GBps ports being slower that the Intel versions. On another note, what motherboard would you recommend that I buy?
review of asrock extreme 4 showing sata port speeds http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013...e4_lga_1155_motherboard_review/3#.UT49QBw9LQM
Looking at narwen's link, I guess the gap between the third-party controllers and the native Intel SATA 6Gbps has closed so my point about them being slower is wrong. I think back in the P67 days, the gap between them was huge so they were only really good for optical drives. As for the motherboard recommendation, I think that ASRock that narwen linked to would probably be your best best. I would recommend the Asus P8Z77-V as I've used it in friend's builds but it's a bit out of your budget.
lancer you are right, many third party sata 3 controllers are slower than intel sata 2 controllers the ASMedia ASM1061 used on the extreme 4 is probably the best
Now, all this 'could' possibly show are the sequential results using the outer cylinders of pretty fast HDDs - nothing to do with either the max throughput of the controllers or how they perform with an OS or software or how a drive will perform over its capacity or... ...however something *very* hinky is going on with their standalone read testing as exactly how they're managing to get a 440MB/s read speed from a single consumer HDD is 'slightly' unusual, as this would make them ~190MB/s faster than a 15K rpm SAS Enterprise drive, which is utter nonsense. As is the idea that 1 HDD is faster than 2 in R0 for sequential r/ws. The issue is that, by using the 50MB setting & through the way that CDM tests, they are using the drive's cache for much of the testing (which is 64MB, so 50MB comfortably fits within though some may be flushed to the drive during the test repeats) so has nothing to do with a normal real life usage... ...& with 100MB then only ~1/3rd of it is being read from the drive, so again is giving artificially high results. [NB the R0 results must have far more flushed to the drive itself as, whilst way too high, they're not quite as excessively foolish - & the variance between the intel & ASMedia controllers may partially be down to latency allowing more to be flushed.] This is a really shonky testing procedure since it gives no results of any value whatsoever & so is a complete waste of time to look at... ...unless your usage happened to be writing 50-100MB files & immediately reading them - which would be somewhat unusual. Otherwise, it's all choice, but you 'could' look at a P8Z77-V (not the LX versions or the higher end ones) as it's ~£120 from Novatech after getting cashback (via topcashback). Yeah, personally have used the deluxe & pro versions here, & set up a new machine for my father using the model suggested last week.
I have a Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H, which I can recommend as it easily overclocks to 4.5GHz. But as usual with Z77 boards, it only has two SATA 6Gbit/s ports from the chipset. Note that, in addition to low speeds, certain crappy controllers don't even support TRIM.
