Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 Intel Z77 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 Intel Z773. Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 (Super High Res Gallery)4. Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 (BIOS & Overclocking)5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra12. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit13. Synthetic: SSD Performance14. Real World: 3D Rendering15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: Handbrake 9.517. Gaming: Total War: Shogun 218. Gaming: F1 201219. Gaming: Dirt Showdown20. Gaming: Sleeping Dogs21. Gaming: Max Payne 322. Technical: Power Consumption23. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

The Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 motherboard ships in a very large box which is indicative of a flagship product. It is double the depth and beautifully finished.

The gatefold box opens up to expose the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 behind a tough plastic productive cover. The other side of the box lists some of the key specifications and selling points.

We sometimes comment on half hearted bundles, but we certainly can't claim that Gigabyte haven't fully loaded this box ! The Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 includes a huge variety of cables including a USB 3.0 drive bay, Crossfire, SLI x2, SLI x3 and SLI x4 connectors. There are also two wireless antenna, I/O backplate, a Gigabyte case badge, user manual, driver and software discs and a plethora of SATA cables.

The Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 is certainly a looker. The bright orange slots and ports look fantastic against the black PCB. Being a motorbike fanatic I was immediately reminded of Austrian bike manufacturer, KTM. This board is based on the E-ATX form factor, measuring 30.5 cm x 26.4 cm.

The Z77 platform is a dual channel memory architecture, and there are four slots on this board supporting up to 32GB of non-ECC DDR3 memory. The company officially list support at 1066/1333/1600/2400+OC, but as we find out later this can be safely ignored. There is full support for Intel XMP memory modules.

Internal I/O connectors are:

1. 1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector
2. 2 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connectors
3. 1 x PCIe power connector
4. 6 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors
5. 4 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors
6. 1 x mSATA connector
7. 1 x CPU fan header
8. 6 x system fan headers
9. 1 x front panel header
10. 1 x front panel audio header
11. 1 x S/PDIF Out header
12. 1 x S/PDIF In header
13. 2 x USB 3.0/2.0 headers
14. 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers
15. 1 x serial port header
16. 1 x Clear CMOS jumper
17. 1 x power button
18. 1 x reset button
19. 1 x Clear CMOS button
20. 1 x Gear button
21. 1 x CPU BCLK Down button
22. 1 x CPU BCLK Up button
23. 1 x CPU Ratio Down button
24. 1 x CPU Ratio Up button
25. 1 x onboard voltage measurement module
26. 2 x BIOS switches
27. 1 x LN2 switch

The CPU socket is surrounded by a three way heatsink which cools the VRM's. As we mentioned earlier in the review the Z77X-UP7 incorporates a hefty 32+3+2 Phase CPU power design.

Close to the CPU socket are not one, but two 8 pin power connectors. It is very unusual to see this on a single socket Z77 motherboard.

There are buttons on the board, for overclocking ‘on the fly'. You can adjust both BCLK and CPU multipler without rebooting into the BIOS. Ideal if you are chasing benchmarking records and don't want to deal with system boot failures. Power, reset and CMOS clear buttons are all included on the board so you can run this easily on a table without a case.

Close to the SATA ports is an mSATA slot, ideal if you want to install a small boot drive without connecting up any SATA drives. We recommend this one in particular if you are interested.

When you are finished overclocking and trying to break benchmark records this board could easily work as a high powered server board. There are no less than 9 SATA ports available via two Marvell 88SE9172 chips. Six of these are SATA 6Gbps capable (white and grey), and the other three are SATA 3 Gbps capable (black). There is support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10.

There are four orange PCI e slots which can be used for QUAD Crossfire and QUAD SLi configurations. Gigabyte have included a single black slot on this board which bypasses the PLX chip for potentially more performance.

The back I/O panel has a PS/2 port for keyboard and mouse and no less than 6 USB 3.0 ports. There are also VGA, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors for onboard graphics and two Gigabit lan connectors. Audio ports are included at the far right.

The Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 really is a fantastic looking motherboard and will look great in a high end, windowed chassis with orange LED lighting.

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