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The Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 UEFI BIOS is certainly fully featured and is split into six main sections.
The System menu gives an overview of the BIOS revision number, date and language.
The BIOS Features panel is important as you can configure the priority of the attached drives. There are various other settings relating to the Boot process here.
The Peripherals menu gives full control over the SATA device configuration and USB, Audio and LAN controllers.
Power Management can be used to wake up the system at specific times.
The last main panel can be used to save and load optimised default settings. There is also an option to load and save profiles you may configure yourself. Underneath this panel is the Q-Flash panel which is used to update the motherboard to the latest revision.
The dedicated overclocking section of this BIOS has every option you could ever want, and then some. The M.I.T. Current status panel is useful to get an overview of your current CPU speeds and installed memory configurations.
The system defaulted to 1,333mhz memory, a safe boot setting. We are using the new ultra fast Corsair Dominator Platinum 2,666mhz so we want to change this as soon as possible.
I have said it before, but I will say it again. I wish Gigabyte would put these sections into a single, scrollable panel. It isn't a major issue, but I spend so much time navigating between these interconnected menus that it becomes a little irritating.
The 3D Power Control panel has a myriad of settings to adjust the loadline calibration. We didn't actually need to play with this too much during testing to get great results with mainstream coolers.
The Core voltage section inside ‘advanced voltage settings'.
DRAM Voltage settings. Why not combine all of these into a single menu?
Overclocking with the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 is very productive, and rather straightforward. We did manage to get a 5.3ghz post at 1.37 volts, but our 3770k needs a lot more voltage at 5ghz+ than I would be happy with without adopting some seriously high end cooling. A 4.9ghz clock speed was 100% stable with the Corsair H100 and 1.35 volts, although the CPU did get a little hot. We always validate our results as it is very easy to ‘claim' an extremely high overclock even if it is useless in the real world.
I would be happier running at 4.8ghz 24/7 as we only need 1.28 volts with our particular 3770k engineering sample.
Well colour me impressed with that one.
Thats a hell of a Z77 motherboard, with a price tag to match. I heard they broke a 7 ghz record with this board on LN2.
Its a heck of a talking point, even if its more expensive than many of the flagship X79 boards.
My last gigabyte motherboard was great, but I opted for ASUS this time around as I had a few issues with the bios on the gigabyte board defaulting the memory to 1333mhz on every hard post up.
Bought one, but ill enter the competition too, as im greedy 🙂
Thats a sublime piece of engineering. very costly, but nice to see companies pushing the boundaries.
that is not a motherboard, it’s a monster-board LOL
it must be very easy for this board to overclock a k-series sandy or ivy.. nice color theme as well but I still wish gigabyte offer something in red…
This board is going on my Christmas list …
Dear Santa…
KaaaBOOMM And the song changes to Who let the dawg out, NO No its Who let the BIG DAWG BEAST OUT? So who said Christmas doesn’t come in JULY!!! hell-o income tax check lol?