Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 Motherboard - The King of the Hill?

Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7: The King of the Hill?

Gigabyte is a company not known to rest on its laurels. Back in 2008, the company introduced its Ultra Durable 3 technology that boasts of two ounces of copper for both power and ground layers with then PCB. This technology is touted to make its boards run cooler, with enhanced stability for overclocking and improved power efficiency. With the advent of motherboards like the ASRock Z77 OC Formula and the MSI Big Bang Z77 MPower that are officially certified to be overclocked, it is only natural that Gigabyte joins in the race with its own offering that features a new and improved Ultra Durable technology with the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7!

We first laid eyes on the board back in Computex 2012 when Gigabyte was introducing its Ultra Durable 5 technology; however, the board was still in development and it looked rather muted. It did boast of hardware specifications and features that were unheard of, and tested, until now. Besides featuring a mind-boggling 32-phase VRM design, this  Extended ATX (EATX) motherboard also features the Ultra Durable 5 technology where the board's single package, single silicon MOSFET called the PowIRstage IR3550, is the single and most crucial improvement over the previous generation Ultra Durable 4 technology.  This new single package design can deliver up to a whopping 60A of current and also enables much cooler VRM operating temperatures; thereby increasing the overall efficiency and longevity of the motherboard.

The GA-Z77X-UP7 sports a LGA1155 CPU socket and is able to support overclocked DDR3 memory modules that have been rated up to 2,800MHz. Although its doesn't support memory modules that has been rated up to 3,000MHz like the ASRock Z77 OC Formula, its 32+3+2 power phase design (32 CPU phases, 3 for onboard graphics and 2 VTT phases) is an industry first. In addition to its new MOSFET design, the board also features an All Digital Engine to deliver power to its CPU.

Four-Way Graphics

Its bright orange PEG slots not only grabs your attention, they are also capable of providing support for both 4-way ATI CrossFireX and NVIDIA SLI graphics configuration. As a nod to the power user, there is a single black PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 PEG slot that is sandwiched between the first two orange slots. This unassuming slot provides direct connection to the CPU and bypasses the splitter chip for a true single graphics card configuration and ensures there's reduced latency by cutting out the 'middle man'.

According to the manual, the abovementioned black PEG slot operates at x16 speeds on the PCIe Gen 3.0 bus when a lone discrete graphics card is installed at that slot - this is also provided that an Intel 'Ivy Bridge' CPU is installed since only these chips have a PCIe Gen 3.0 controller. Once any card is installed in an orange PEG slot, this lone black slot will be disabled.

So apart from a special black PEG slot (labelled as PCIEX16_2), let's talk about 4-way graphics support utilizing the rest of the orange slots that are labelled as PCIEX16_1, PCIEX16_3, PCIEX8_1 and PCIEX8_2 slots (from top to bottom referring to the photo above). Usually, LGA1155 CPU based boards can only supply 16 lanes for PEG slots and offer very limited bandwidth when there are more than two graphics cards to be supported. However, this monster motherboard spares no expense to equip it with the expensive PLX PEX 8747 high speed switching chip, which takes in the 16 lanes from the processor's PCIe 3.0 controller and fans it out to supply up to 32 PCIe lanes, essentially doubling the bandwidth. This allows the board to support PCIe lane configurations in the following manner - x16/x16, or x16/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8  - to support dual, triple or quad graphics card simultaneously respectively.

Needless to say, you can tell from the photo that the board doesn't have any legacy PCI slots to support older RAID or sound cards. Also worth noting from the photo below is the black heatsink that's marked with a red box, provides cooling to the PLX PEX 8747 switching chip; the heatsink is also connected via a heatpipe to the other VRM and chipset heatsinks respectively.

VRM Cooling

As we trace the heatpipe up to the VRM heatsinks, we noticed their fin-like design, which Gigabyte has aptly named as "Thin Fin" heatsink design and it sports the signature Gigabyte OC motherboard's sparing orange livery. Gigabyte claims the new heatsink design offers a larger surface area so that quicker heat exchange can occur.

We also see the high capacity 60A ferrite chokes that are located in front of the VRM heatsinks that work together with the PowIRstage IR3550 MOSFET as well as its digital power controllers for CPU voltage regulation.

Moving beyond the CPU socket, we see the four DIMM slots and a collection of OC-Touch buttons and their functions are further explained the Overclocking section of the article. Near the buttons are the LN2 switch and the Clear CMOS button. We did notice that once the board is mounted in the chassis, and with the optical drives mounted, the clear CMOS button may not be accessible anymore. Furthermore, there isn't one located at the rear I/O panel; hence, if the BIOS settings need to be reset, the only way is to short the clear CMOS jumper located near the last orange PEG slot of the board.

Located just below the group of OC-Touch buttons is the onboard voltage measurement module where users can connect the leads of a multimeter directly to the pins for voltage measurement, or they can connect the bundled voltage measurement cable to a voltage measurements header and connect the ends of the cable to the multimeter's leads.

More Features of the Motherboard

Due to the presence of a pair of Marvell 88SE9172 controller chips, there are additional four SATA 6Gbps connectors, with support for RAID 0 and 1. The board's Intel Z77 chipset provides the usual pair of SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps connectors, with support for RAID modes of 0, 1, 5 and 10.

To the right of the white SATA connectors, there is a gray SATA power connector that provides auxiliary power to the onboard PEG slots. According to the manual, when two or more graphics cards are installed, it is recommended to use this extra power connection to ensure system stability.

Located behind the SATA connectors, there is an onboard mSATA slot for mSATA SSDs. With an installed mSATA SSD, users can take advantage of SSD-based technologies like Intel Smart Response and Intel Rapid Start. For an idea of the performance levels of such an SSD, you can check out our review on the Plextor M5M mSATA SSD.

At this edge of the board where the headers are located, we see the switches for controlling the Dual BIOS technology on the board. These switches are located right next to the front panel header. The M/B switch toggles between the main and the backup BIOS options; while the SB switch allows you to enable or disable the Dual BIOS function.

Next, we focused our attention on the rear I/O connectors. We felt that a clear CMOS button should be located here as its present location will pose a challenge to system tweakers who need to reset the board's BIOS when it has been mounted in a chassis with an optical drive blocking the button's accessibility.

Wireless Connectivity Options

There is a GC-WB300D PCIe x1 Wi-Fi/Bluetooth expansion card and two accompanying antennae bundled with the board. Its installation is straightforward and prior to its operation, note that we also had to install its Windows drivers.

Gigabyte EasyTune 6

There were a number of applications that came bundled with the board on a DVD-ROM. One of the most prominent is Gigabyte's EasyTune 6 that is a system utility tool that allows users to fine-tune the settings of their rig or to overclock their system in the Windows OS environment. It has been a long while since we last touched upon this tool, so we'll relate our usage experience of this utility and how it copes with a modern system's OC aspects. EasyTune 6 actually comprises of a number of reporting tools, but the default tab shown is Tuner, which is the most important portion of the utility.

The Quick Boost Mode of the Tuner section presents us three buttons to overclock the system. We decided to test the utility's capability to overclock our rig by choosing the most difficult option, Level 3. After clicking on the corresponding button, the software prompted us to reboot the system. During the reboot, we quickly delved into the UEFI BIOS utility to peek at the any changes in the BIOS settings made by EasyTune 6. We managed to spot a few changes as EasyTune 6 adjusted the CPU/PCIe Base Clock from 100MHz to 104MHz and it bumped up the CPU Clock Ratio from 35 to 45.

At the same time, it also made an adjustment to the Dynamic Vcore by increasing the offset voltage to a value of +0.150V.

The Tuner component, in its Quick Boost Mode, presents a simple and easy to use manner to overclock our test rig; however, when we ran our Cinebench 11.5 benchmark to ascertain the stability of the board in its OC state, the benchmark failed to complete as it crashed midway during its execution. This goes to show that the utility probably has preset OC states corresponding to the three levels of Quick Boost but there are no strenuous checks made to ascertain the success level of the overclocked settings. As such, you'll have to still contend with fine tuning to achieve a stable overclock.

Moving on, toggling to its Easy mode, the large visual button-driven menu was replaced by another menu with three tabs - Frequency, Ratio and Voltage, but only the Frequency tab could be accessed. At the said tab, we could only adjust the BCLK frequency by adjusting its slider, clicking on the black arrow ends, or by entering the value into the text box. In order to reset the BCLK frequency, we had to click the small circle near the right-pointing black arrow end. We know it's not a pretty intuitive interface, but it works.

In its Advanced mode, we were finally able to access the Ratio and Voltage tabs as well unlock the memory frequency settings of the Frequency tab.

The Voltage tab presented us a wide selection of voltage settings and a number of the settings like CPU Vcore, CPU Vtt, CPU PLL, IMC and much more. These are the more commonly used settings for intermediate levels of overclocking. You could go ahead to tweak everything else, but you'll need to be an expert hand to keep track of the various variables involved and what directly contributed to an increase or decrease in overclockability.

After changing any values, take note that you've to click the Set button in order to implement changes made. The settings can also be saved as a local file on the system and loaded when they are needed.

BIOS Utility

The UEFI BIOS Utility of the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 (and that of other new high-end Gigabyte boards) comes in two forms; the 3D mode and the traditional UEFI format. The Gigabyte 3D BIOS allows novice or casual users to visualize the components of the motherboard that are being affected through the BIOS settings. It is a fancy way to present certain aspects of the board to the novice user. Power users need not apply here!

To bypass the 3D BIOS utility, we had to click on the "Advanced" icon to access the familiar UEFI BIOS utility. The main top navigation tabs allowed us to have a quick overview of the settings of the board's BIOS. We appreciate the large navigation tabs; while on the right, descriptions of the functions of each menu item and short-cut keys are available.

BIOS Settings

For our overclocking exercise, we accessed the Advanced Frequency Settings and the Advanced Voltage Settings pages. We'll start with the former:-

The Advanced CPU Core Features sub-menu (pictured below) allowed us to set the Turbo Ratios for different number of active CPU core. For our overclocking exercise, we decided to maintain the same values across, regardless of the number of active cores. We also had to tweak the Turbo Power Limit (Watts) in order to achieve a stable OC system.

The Advanced Voltage Settings sub-menu allowed us to tweak the voltage settings for the following at its CPU Core Voltage Control section:-

• CPU Vcore
• CPU Vtt
• CPU PLL
• IMC

Voltage Controls Across Different Boards

While most enthusiast class boards these days have way too many overclocking related settings, we've decided to compile the available voltage settings of the various Z77 boards we've tested. As you'll see later in our overclocking efforts, we decided to manually adjust the voltage of the CPU PLL to determine how high we can push the CPU Base Frequency. In the case of this particular board, base frequency values can be adjusted by 10KHz for finer tweaking.

Test Setup

This is the test configuration of the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 motherboard:-

• Intel Core i7-3770K
• 2 x 2GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 (CAS 9-9-9-27)
• MSI N460GTX Hawk (ForceWare 285.62)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gbps hard drive (one single NTFS partition)
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
• Intel INF 9.3.0.1020

Benchmarks

The following benchmarks were used to test the board:

• BAPCo SYSmark 2007 Preview (ver 1.06)
• SPECviewperf 9.0
• Futuremark PCMark Vantage (ver 1.03.1, 64-bit)
• Futuremark PCMark 7
• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage (ver 1.03.1)
• Futuremark 3DMark11 (ver 1.03)
• Far Cry 2

Results - SYSmark 2007 Preview

The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 is just slightly ahead of the ASRock Z77 OC Formula board as it turns in a rather lackluster performance in this productivity benchmark. It was weak  in the E-Learning and Video Creation tests like the ASRock board; hence, their scores were rather similar while the MSI Z77 MPower took top spot in this test.

Results - Futuremark PCMark Vantage

The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7's performance was below expectations as its scores hovered in in the region of its enthusiast class Intel Z77 Gigabyte counterpart. In fact, when compared to the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe, the former board's score was about 4% behind its score, failing to outclass the ASUS' board, just like its two other overclocking-sanctioned compatriot boards.

Results - PCMark 7

The results of the overall PCMark 7 scores mirror the standings of the boards as shown in the earlier PCMark Vantage tests, the high-end Intel Z77 board from ASUS and the OC-sanctioned MSI Z77 MPower taking the first two positions, and with our main protagonists, the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 scrapping ahead of the ASRock Z77 OC Formula, while losing out to its other counterpart, the GA-Z77X-UD5H-WB WiFi.

Results - SPECviewperf 9.0

The GA-Z77X-UP7 turned in almost the same scores as the ASRock Z77 OC Formula in both test viewsets; while the rest of the three boards pulled ahead slightly, in a collective manner.

Results - Gaming

Surprisingly, its gaming performance was rather lackluster, only pulling ahead in terms of churning out frame rates for Far Cry 2, our last gaming benchmarking test.

Temperature

The GA-Z77X-UP7 board's operating temperatures recorded at both points were above 40 degrees Celsius! This is despite the presence of its new "Thin Fin" heatsink design that makes up its cooling assembly that is linked up by heatpipes from the VRM heatsinks to that of the board's chipset.

Power Consumption

The board also tops the rest in terms of power consumption, but this is due to the presence of more voltage regulation components of Gigabyte's new UP7 standards, that include PowIRstage ICs and high-current 60A chokes. Even if you put that aside, the board does have more ICs onboard that provide for the board's full feature list. All this naturally add up to a slightly increased power draw.

Overclocking

In line with our past overclocking exercises, the GA-Z77X-UP7 was pushed to its limits on three fronts. First, we tried to achieve the highest CPU base frequency by pushing it beyond the default value of 100MHz. At the same time, we kept the DRAM timings at the default values defined by the Intel XMP specifications that was compatible with our Kingston HyperX memory modules. We also set the DRAM voltages to around 1.65V to ensure system stability at the higher CPU base frequency.

Highest CPU Base Frequency

In this section, we managed to get a stable overclock by adjusting the voltage of the CPU Vtt to a value of 1.295V and the DRAM Voltage to a high of 1.65V. With that, we managed to push the board's CPU Base Frequency to a high of 110MHz!

Highest CPU Core Ratio

In the second scenario, we kept the host CPU base frequency at 100HMz while we attempted to achieve the highest CPU core ratio. For this section of the exercise, we kept the CPU Vtt at "Auto" while raising CPU Vcore to 1.450V and the CPU PLL to 1.890V. We changed the DRAM Voltage back to its "Auto" settings as well. We managed to reach a stable OC state with the GA-Z77X-UP7 achieving a maximum CPU Core Ratio of 48, with its CPU operating at a Turbo-boosted high of 4.8GHz!

Highest Overall Overclock

In the final overclocking scenario, we attempted to achieve maximum overclock on both the CPU base frequency and the CPU core ratio. As mentioned earlier, we increased the CPU core voltage to a high of 1.450V, instead of usual average value of 1.25V. This is because unlike other boards we've tested to-date that didn't return any positive gains, the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 managed to push ahead and deliver better overclockability. However, we strongly advise against doing this in the long run as it may risk damaging the CPU from excessive operating temperatures - without the right cooling equipment and know-how of a more skillful overclocker.

With our disclaimers stated, we managed to overclock our Intel Core i7-3770K to 4.7GHz; with the board's CPU Core Ratio set at 45 and its CPU Base Frequency at 104.48MHz. In order to achieve a stable clock at this juncture, we had to tweak the voltages of its CPU PLL and IMC, as well as to set the board's Turbo Power Limit to a high of 500W.

Our overclocking experience with the board was actually rather pleasant, which is not something we can say for every other board. Its well-documented manual is a boon to those who need further assistance and while its UEFI BIOS utility was a little hard to navigate, it did offer a myriad of finer points in voltage and power settings. The lesson gleaned from our OC exercise, the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 is certainly built for overclockers in mind but we would approach it by just adjusting the board's CPU Ratio (the second scenario) as it was offered the least hassle with the maximum performance gain. So while the board wasn't stellar in normal usage benchmark performance, overclocking brought out the best out of the board's potential.

Overclocking using OC-Touch

We also tried our hands on using the onboard OC-Touch buttons during our overclocking exercise. According to the company, on-the-fly changes can be made to the base clock frequency and CPU ratio with these set of buttons, in whatever the environment (BIOS, DOS, Windows etc.) without the need to reboot the system. In theory, this sounds very handy when the overclocker needs to edge out a performance gain quickly (if it works to his advantage).

Alas, the instructions on how to utilize the OC-Touch feature wasn't very explicit. While we expected Gigabyte's OC-Touch feature to function in a similar manner as ASRock's Rapid OC that we used when reviewing the ASRock Z77 OC Formula motherboard, little did we expect that Gigabyte's OC-Touch didn't have an accompanying software. We dug deeper at the product's support page and managed to download OC-Touch drivers for our Windows 7 test rig; however, we were unable to locate any dedicated software for the OC-Touch feature.

We were able to tweak the settings of the board with the OC-Touch buttons after the successful installation of their Windows driver; however, we would like to see the OC-Touch feature implemented in a similar manner as ASRock's Rapid OC where our changes and settings were reflected in the sofware's GUI. In this case, our changes were reflected in our standard CPU-Z utility; however, we strongly felt that the absence of dedicated OC-Touch software is an affront to the pedigree of such a high-end board. We also attempted to use the OC-Touch buttons to see if the changes made by their adjustments would be reflected in the Tuner utility of EasyTune 6; however, they didn't work well together, resulting in frequent system lockups.

With reference to the photograph below, the first set of "+" and "-" buttons allowed us to adjust the CPU Ratio of the board; while with the other set, we were able to tweak the base clock frequency accordingly. By depressing the "Gear" button next to them, we were able to change the frequency in steps of 0.01MHz, else the buttons will change the frequency in steps of 1MHz. Again, better labeling or silk screening on the board would have been ideal to figure out the use of all these buttons without referring to the manual - especially if you don't use these physical buttons often.

Overclocking with Gigabyte EasyTune Touch

The Gigabyte EasyTune Touch is an exclusive iOS software that works exclusively with select Gigabyte boards that ship with a PCIe expansion card that offers Bluetooth 4.0 LE and Wi-Fi connectivity. It works with the host Gigabyte Cloud Station utility and allows users to remotely control their desktop system with a powerful suite of software functions that include overclocking and system tweaking, system monitoring, with the ability to also remotely power down the PC. EasyTune Touch also offers overclocking at the touch of a button, with three preset overclocking configurations that offer convenient performance enhancement with its unique Quick Boost function.

Before using the EasyTune Touch software, we had to set up the its PCIe expansion card as the GA-Z77X-UP7 shipped with a GC-WB300D card with two accompanying antennae, one for each connectivity option, to extend the wireless range of the system. We also had to connect a USB cable from the card's USB connector to one of the board's USB onboard connectors. After the successful hardware installation, we had to install the Gigabyte Cloud Utility software on our rig.

After installing our EasyTune Touch software, we also had to ensure our iOS device and test rig were on the same Wi-Fi network before we could proceed further. With reference to the screenshots below, the one on the right is the main menu of the EasyTune Touch.

After that, we proceeded to connect to the services of the Gigabyte Cloud Utility by tapping on the "Connection" tab of the main menu. Tap the host's name in the list to connect to the cloud utility.

Upon establishing the link, we were able to use our iOS device to remotely configure our test rig and we dived into overclocking it by using the Tuner function of the software suite.

Our experience with the Tuner utility drew mixed feelings; while we were grateful that we were able to configure the BIOS settings without being tethered to the test area; however, editing the values from the soft keyboard of our iOS device was a mixed affair as there were times our edited values were not saved and we had to re-enter our values again. Another point of discontentment is that our changes were not saved at the the platform-level; after a reboot, our EasyTune settings were not saved to the BIOS of the board.

Besides attempting to overclock the system manually, we also tried our hands on the using the automated overclocking feature called Quick Boost. It did manage to overclock our system and its changes to the BIOS settings were permanent as they were saved; however, we failed to achieve a stable state even with the Fast Mode. We attempted to enter the BIOS UEFI utility to examine the settings of the Fast Mode but we failed as its settings somehow caused the utility to freeze. In the end, we had to reset the BIOS settings to our test rig back to its normal operational state.

All in all, we feel that it's a nifty way of tweaking some settings on the fly without entering the BIOS, without exiting an running test program and even away from the test machine, but it wasn't exactly a smooth affair all the time. Our advise is to use it as an auxiliary tool for the mentioned plus points, but it won't replace the conventional style of overclocking anytime soon.

Conclusion

Based on our experience with the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 board, we felt that its performance in its non-overclocked state was rather run-of-the-mill as it was somewhat on par with the ASRock Z77 OC Formula. It even failed to best the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe, a board that's targeted at the mainstream DIY enthusiast. Its power consumption was somewhat higher than other Intel Z77 boards we have tested and its "Thin-Fin" VRM heatsink didn't cast a positive light as it registered high operating temperatures of about 42 degree Celsius during load operations. However, it has perfectly valid reasons to back its outcome as we shall outline further.

On a bright note, we were truly impressed with the rich feature set of the board. From its ten-layer PCB in order to accommodate all the motherboard traces that connect the onboard components of the board, to the support of 4-way multi-GPU configurations with 32 lanes of PCIe Gen 3.0 connectivity (at 8x speeds per PEG slot, courtesy of its PLX switching chip) and its 32 phases of CPU power circuitry, Gigabyte has attempted to put in the best of its engineering research into the construction of this board and spared no expense in decking it with a board brimming with features. Due to the large number of components to support all of its features, the board naturally drew more power than the rest of the boards in comparison and it shouldn't be a concern for most power users gunning for such a powerful board.

The VRM solution of the board was put to excellent use during our overclocking exercise as we easily achieved new highs on all three sub-tests that determine the board's overclocking prowess. Not only did the board really excel at overclocking, but it also achieved it with relative ease, true to the Gigabyte style of overclocking that we've come to appreciate.

We found the bundled software titles adequate and the main EasyTune 6 utility did its job well; however, it didn't gel well with OC-Touch buttons and there was a clear lack of integration with the 3D Power software of the board. The 3D Power utility allowed us to configure certain aspects of the power settings of the CPU and Memory, while EasyTuner 6 covered most aspects and in greater detail. We hope to see better integration and a possible amalgamation of these two utilities.

In conclusion, the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 is a board meant for overclockers and serious gamers. Its price tag is almost S$600 and its superlative capabilities translate to higher power consumption and operating temperatures. This board is not meant for the fainthearted. This king is truly in a class of its own and to commend where it really excels - overclocking - we've also bestowed the board with our Most Overclockable Product award.

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