It was brought to our attention by a lot of different readers, including that of a competitor, that a lot of controversy has been going around behind the scenes and this relates to one of the best selling Z77 motherboards currently on the market; the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H. The long and short of it revolves around how a lot of people in the industry and consumers believe that it’s missing capacitors on the underside of the CPU socket.
A typical design from other board manufacturers would look like the following picture showing a full set of capacitors:
The underside of the Z77X-UD5H seems a bit bare when comparing it to other boards, as shown below with only a single capacitor and plenty of solder points:
After notifying Gigabyte of this, we were given the following official statement from a Gigabyte representative:
“Gigabyte have followed Intel’s reference design and that it has no effect on overclocking and no performance effect either”.
If this story develops further, we will bring you the latest up-to-date news on it, but from our own intensive testing procedure, we were able to maximise our i7 2700k and i7 3770k processors while keeping stability at an all-time maximum while using the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H.
A more detailed response from Gigabyte reads as follows:
1. Gigabyte Z77 boards have an advanced power design that includes an industry-leading digital PWM and a 2x copper PCB that is exclusive to Gigabyte. None of our competitors use the same designs and technology, we have no idea what the capacitor ratings are on competitor boards and don’t wish to comment as that would be unprofessional, but it seems that they possibly need additional capacitors on the underside of their board designs and according to our testing and validation processes, Gigabyte do not.
2. We are possibly being attacked by our competitors with pictures that are essentially meaningless. Other than showing these pictures, they haven’t so much as indicated what possible problem there might be or produced stats to prove there is a performance issue with the product
3. We are completely confident in our design and back it up with a comprehensive warranty on all our boards.
4. Third party media reviewers have looked at the product and given it top marks for performance and design these media do not work for Gigabyte and are independent, we feel these reviews reflect our commitment to product quality and speak volume in regard to the Z77X-UD5H itself.
Strange they claim following Intel's reference design because I just took a look at Intel's own DZ77GA board which includes those capacitors. The argument of the digital PWM and 2x copper has not much to do with the capacitors below the CPU as far as I can tell, this is just Gigabyte marketing talk to spin the story. I will not bet surprised when more Gigabyte boards go up in flames.
Either they compensated for the capacitance somewhere else somewhere on the board, somewhere in the PCB using thin dielectric material or their PWM are not as noisy as their competitors.