Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Motherboard Sandy Bridge Review

Today involves seeing an influx of Z77 based content all around the web, with a huge chunk of it from us at eTeknix. We have been eating, sleeping and breathing Z77 for quite some time now. Now with Z77 we see a new range of processors being released shortly; codenamed Ivy Bridge, but sadly Intel are only letting us unwrap the Z77 chipset today, and not the matching processors. That doesn't mean that Z77 is worthless, by no means, as it's still compatible with the well known and much loved Sandy Bridge socket 1155 processors including our shiny i7 2700k that we have pushed to the limits and back again. Even after all this time, it's still going strong. Now, with Z77 being released from Intel, we see a ton of boards being let into the wild from some of the biggest brands around, and one of those brands is a true market leader Gigabyte. If you were at CeBIT or saw any of our footage, you would have noticed that Gigabyte are releasing a very large range of boards indeed, and near the top end of the range is where you will find the board we are looking at today; the Z77X-UD5H. Now we won't be delving into the whole aesthetics of the board and how fancy it looks, as we did all of that in our preview, which can be found here. Instead, we will be focussing on the performance of this board when using a Sandy Bridge based processor until the end of this month when we can finally show you what Ivy Bridge can really do when paired with this new Intel Z77 chipset. The BIOS is something interesting if you've never seen it as it incorporates a Dual UEFI based BIOS and is very user friendly and quite easy on the eyes too. The first part of the BIOS includes various sections that can be found along the top and each have a corresponding image. The first section is the M.I.T area which is similar to what we've seen on older BIOS versions from Gigabyte. Within here, you will find various settings to overclocking your components. We can see the current status of your components including CPU speeds, turbo ratio and how many DIMMs and what capacity of modules are installed. The advanced frequency settings is where we will find overclockers most frequently as this gives you direct access to your Base clock, CPU multiplier and XMP settings. In terms of memory settings, a whole section is devoted to it with XMP and timing options present. In terms of pushing things further, you will find a section that caters for power control where you can adjust voltage and calibration settings. More voltage settings can be found under the CPU voltage control section. Moving back to memory, we can find that memory can be tweaked in terms of voltage too. You can also check up on your PC Health Status which allows you to monitor voltages and temperatures easily and efficiently. Moving along to the system section, we can see which BIOS version we are running, the date, time and other basic settings. Moving to the BIOS features, we can see options for our boot devices and main start-up settings. The Peripherals section gives us all of the relevant options for the onboard devices, including USB, Audio, LAN and SATA. Power management is exactly that and allows you to change various options relevant to power based functionality. The other and probably more interesting part of the Dual UEFI BIOS is all in 3D. Well not quite 3D, but you get a view of the motherboard which allows you to select relevant aspects of the board. For instance, if we click on the rear I/O, we find a pop-up box appear, giving us options for the rear panel and USB settings. Clicking around the CPU socket reveals settings and options for Phase, Voltage, Current and Thermal properties. Clicking on the CPU itself or the memory will give you all of the options for overclocking and tweaking the processor and memory modules. Clicking on the Z77 chipset/passive heatsink, you'll find some of the main features for the BIOS and POST screens. The expansion lanes give a few options for configuration the various slots. Moving over to the SATA ports, you'll find the ability to change the mode from IDE to AHCI and also have the ability to enable or disable the SATA controller. To test this board, we are able to run all of our tests at stock speeds using a pre-defined setup of hardware. We will also be overclocking the processor to 4.6GHz to see how the board compares against the stock speed. Also in terms of overclocking, we will be looking to see how far we can push the processor. Test system: Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Intel Core i7 2700k Corsair Vengeance LP 1600MHz AMD Radeon HD 7970 Corsair H80 Corsair HX1050 Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Lian Li T60 3 x AOC E2795VH We would like to thank AOC, Asus, Corsair, Kingston and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Comparison used: Overclocked to 4.6GHz Many different software applications are also used to gain the broadest spectrum of results, which allows for the fairest testing possible. Software used: 3DMark 11 AIDA64 ATTO Cinebench R11.5 CPU-Z Heaven PCMark 7 Metro 2033 Super PI Overclocking was something we were really keen to look into, as we wanted to see what the Z77 chipset had to offer with our i7 2700k Sandy Bridge processor as we already knew what it was capable of on a Z68 platform. We started to push the multiplier from 4.6 to 4.8 and then on to 5GHz. Things were looking hopeful when we wanted to push the overclock even further and 5.2GHz was in our sights. We managed to hit that sweet spot of 5.2GHz, but anything above that was a no go area. We tried to increase the multiplier to 53, but no matter what voltage we chucked at the board, it wouldn't go above 52. Our next choice was to increase the bus speed, but that also seemed to be stubborn and wanting to stay at 100MHz leaving us with a final overclock of 5.2GHz. CPU-Z being CPU-Z decided not to show the true voltage, but we recorded the voltage at 1.528 due to the fluctuation of the voltage once the CPU had been loaded. All in all, a great overclock was had from this board, and could end up rivalling some higher-end boards on the market. Cinebench R11.5 CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It's completely free. Cinebench gave a solid score of 6.90 at stock. Once overclocked, we saw a nice boost up to 8.99 points. Super PI Super PI is a computer program that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a Windows port of the program used by Yasumasa Kanada in 1995 to compute pi to 232 digits. Super PI came in at 9.38 minutes, with the 4.6 overclock shaving just over 2 seconds from the calculation time. 3DMark 11 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. Taking a look at gaming performance, a respectable score of 2727 on Extreme and 7972 on Performance was had. Overclocking the CPU saw a significant boost on the Performance preset, and a slightly smaller marginal increase on the Extreme preset. Unigine Heaven 2.5 Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine™ engine. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies and utilises the full effect of DirectX 11 and allows you to configure shaders, tessellation and quality settings to your own personal choice. Keeping the focus on gaming, the overclock didn't help much, but still respectable results were had across both resolutions. Metro 2033 Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market. Also taking a look at a real-time game, we can see the overclock increased framerates by around 2FPS on both resolutions, showing that this board is more than capable of harnessing the power of other components. AIDA64 AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. AIDA64 Extreme Edition provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Stock speeds gave us good results across read, write and copy speeds. When overclocked, we saw the write speed jump by over 4000MB/s, with the read and copy speeds also increasing by substantial amounts.ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Our Kingston HyperX SSD showed identical speeds across both stock and overclocked results at 555.3MB/s read and 513.7MB/s write. PCMark 7 PCMark 7 provides a set of 7 suites for measuring different aspects of PC performance with a high degree of accuracy. Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark Suite. The Lightweight Suite measures the capabilities of entry level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the full PCMark suite. Common use performance is measured by the Entertainment, Creativity and Productivity scenario suites. Component performance is measured by the Computation and Storage hardware suites. The Storage suite is ideal for testing SSDs and external hard drives in addition to the system drive. PCMark 7 gave an indication as to how this system can cope under a variety of tests. When overclocked to 4.6GHz, the score increased by over 700 points. ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. Looking at our Kingston HyperX USB 3.0 flash drive, we saw some really strong results for the read speed, though slightly lacking on the write speeds, as we should be expecting over 100MB/s write speeds. To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the system takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. Idle power consumption results are really promising with this board with thanks for the new technologies that Gigabyte have implemented. Even when overclocked, we only saw a maximum idle consumption of 115.8 Watts. At load, we still kept things under 264.1 Watts at 4.6GHz which is quite an achievement. I hate doing conclusions sometimes as I never know where to start, and with this board there is so much to talk about and all I really want to do is shout from the rooftops about how good it is, as it simply is. The styling is second to none with a great colour scheme and a layout that will keep you constantly looking at it from the corner of your eye with a big smile on your face. This comes down to the black and blue colouring that has been adopted onto the board. The layout is nice and simple and some key features including overclocking buttons and debug LED have also been featured to give that little bit extra to you. Cooling has been really thought about with this board as we find large blue heatsinks connected via heatpipes to give a completely silent operation with style and substance at the top of Gigabyte's priorities. Functionality is at an all-time high with plenty of options for expansion cards, with three x16 sized lanes, three PCIe x1 lanes and a legacy PCI slot for older generation cards. USB 3.0 is packed onto this board with a whopping 3 native headers and of course more USB 3.0 on the rear I/O. Also, we find that included is a USB 3.0 front panel bay which gives even more functionality to the end-user where they need it most. Over front panel connectors include a nifty BIOS switch with corresponding LEDs for the extreme clockers and tweakers. Overclocking was something I was really keen to see on this board, as we were unsure how a board aimed at the higher-end of the mainstream market would compare with other boards that are clearly aimed at overclockers in mind. With that in mind, we were amazed to see a top result of 5.2GHz from our 2700k, as these speeds should be reserved for the likes of the G1 series, which gives us the question, of wondering how the G1 Sniper boards will do when we get them in for testing. In terms of pricing, you'll find this board at a remarkably low price of £167.72 from Scan, or with a bundled Wi-Fi adapter for £182.12 from Scan. It's also worth noting that the first 30 customers to buy this board from Scan will get a FREE Antec Kuhler 620 All-In-One watercooling unit for the same price of £167.72. This board really does seem to tick every box on the list, with a great style, fantastic functionality with plenty of configuration options, an amazingly easy to use BIOS, extreme overclockability and a simply attractive price tag that will leave us asking what the catch is? We can't find one, and we honestly believe that this will be one of the best selling boards on the market, not just from Gigabyte, but from every company jumping on the Intel Z77 bandwagon.