Gigabyte GA-Z77-UP4 TH (Z77) Motherboard Review

It’s been a few months now since the roll out of Z77, closely followed by the very successful Ivy Bridge platform. We know that to some its all a bit of hot air and since its got the hugely successful Sandy Bridge platform in its wake, its understandable why.

Moving on, we first heard back at CES of the new Thunderbolt interface and how it was going to lay the foundations for highly increased data transfer rates, but until more recently, that is all we knew. Its only been in the last month or two – especially at Computex – that we have been able to hear more and more about Thunderbolt and how its going to [hopefully] revolutionise motherboard technology in the coming months and years.

As it currently stands we do have take a slight step back with the Thunderbolt side of things as the technology is so new for desktop PC, that there are only a small number of products on the market that support the new interface, much like we saw when USB3.0 was first unveiled, and so we’ll have to leave testing on these grounds for the time being.

We know Gigabyte have one very strong following and their high end boards such as the G1.Sniper M3 are strong contenders against the likes of Asus’ Maximus V Gene and the rest of the ROG crop. In the mainstream market we have found their boards to be virtually rock solid especially when overclocking, and justice to this has been given by a string of overclocking world records, nearly all acheived on a Gigabyte motherboard of sorts.

As said, we don’t have the facilities at this present time to test Thunderbolt or explore it in any more detail to what we know, however we will add in a section based around Thunderbolt and what it’s all about. Alongside this we will take a look in the box and around the board, after which we will get it onto our test bench with a 3770k and see what it can do in our array of tests.