Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 (Z77) Motherboard Review

Overall, Gigabyte have put together one heck of a feature rich board and it’s no surprise that this board is also becoming a strong favourite amongst overclockers and users who like to kit out their rigs with as much power as they can. The UP7 is one of the few Z77 boards on the market that can handle four way GPU configurations and I’m sure this again will prove to be popular amongst users who like to break records on the likes of HWBot with multi GPU systems.

Looking over the performance, I’d have to be honest and say that if you’re going to keep your CPU at stock speeds, then there are equally good motherboards out there from Gigabyte, but let’s face it, if you’re spending a good amount on a board like this that has an extremely high level of build quality from the ground up, then you know what you’re after. In a similar fashion you would most likely be overclocking the system and consequently unleashing the huge boost in performance that is to be had.

Whilst the price does seem steep, putting the board aside, we do find one of the most comprehensive accessory packages that gigabyte has to offer with USB3.0 and eSATA panels, Bluetooth and WiFi on a plug in card and a number of SLI bridges for those multi-GPU configurations. Where most of the cost lies is with the overclocking features on hand and we know that Gigabyte have made sure this board can overclock well, that is proven by its world record 7.102GHz result and items such as the OC buttons, industry leading thirty two phase power delivery design and more efficient cooling design of the phases with a new ‘thin fin’ heatsink design.

We know that for the vast majority of users this is going to be overkill, but for those out there that are looking at this level of board, it’s feature rich spec list, beautiful design, and top level overclocking performance easily justify the price tag and we expect to see a number of additional records broken in the future with one of these boards, it really is the dream board for Z77  overclockers at the current time.