Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH Review: Thunderbolt Times Two
by Ian Cutress on September 17, 2012 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Gigabyte
- Z77
- thunder
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
OCZ for donating the Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Micron for donating our SATA testing SSD
G.Skill for donating our memory kits
ASUS for donating AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit
ECS for donating NVIDIA GPUs
Test Setup
| Processor |
Intel Core i7-3770K ES 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.5 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) |
| Motherboards |
ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ASRock Z77 Extreme6 ASRock Z77 Extreme9 ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional ASUS P8Z77-V Pro ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Biostar TZ77XE4 ECS Z77H2-AX EVGA Z77 FTW Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3 Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP4 TH MSI Z77A-GD65 |
| Cooling | Intel All-in-One Liquid Cooler |
| Power Supply | OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series |
| Memory |
GSkill RipjawsZ 4x4 GB DDR3-2400 9-11-11 Kit GSkill TridentX 2x4 GB DDR3-2666 11-13-13 Kit |
| Memory Settings | XMP (2400 9-11-11) |
| Video Cards |
ASUS HD7970 3GB ECS GTX 580 1536MB |
| Video Drivers |
Catalyst 12.3 NVIDIA Drivers 296.10 WHQL |
| Hard Drive | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
| Case | Open Test Bed - CoolerMaster Lab V1.0 |
| Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
| SATA Testing | Micron RealSSD C300 256GB |
| USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
Similar to the X79S-UP5, the IR3550 ICs used in these UP boards do really well when it comes to power consumption. The Z77X-UP4 TH takes the top spot in idle power consumption on our test bed.
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IanCutress - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
I have access to a TB device, but it is only the two-bay Little Big disk with a pair of Intel Drives. Can't really stress the TB implementation in terms of peak speeds, and in our copy test it can get anything from 1.1 seconds to 3.3 seconds depending on if the wind is blowing, or the tides are in (very unpredictable).When I can get a 4-bay TB device in, I will fill it with 500MB/s+ SSDs and get down to testing. Unless there is a specific test you would like me to do (4K et al).
Ian
repoman27 - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
I am very curious about a couple points, however they are not the easiest scenarios to test.Firstly, GIGABYTE depicts the ability to support a total of 12 connected Thunderbolt devices plus 2 displays, or 6 devices AND 1 display per port. [ http://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/306/images/thund... ] This seems to fly in the face of what we have been told by Apple and Intel about supported topologies, i.e. "up to a total of 6 devices, including up to 2 high resolution DisplayPort v1.1a displays". Can a single Cactus Ridge DSL3510L really handle that many devices? Is there some difference in implementation between Windows and Mac OS?
GIGABYTE also claims a full 10 Gbps of PCIe bandwidth from each port. Now I would also doubt that claim, and in the article you indicated this wasn't happening with a single DSL3510L. However, Anand achieved 1380 MB/s by using both Thunderbolt ports during his review of the MBPR, which also uses just one DSL3510L controller. Now ultimately this controller is bound by its PCIe 2.0 x4 back end, which should limit it to around 1600 MB/s of payload throughput, but breaking the 1000 MB/s barrier would seem to imply that there is more than one PCIe to Thunderbolt protocol adapter in these Cactus Ridge chips. This would be significant if true. Any chance you could lean on it hard enough to find out?
goinginstyle - Monday, September 17, 2012 - link
I agree about the need for TB testing as I have had nothing but issues with this board and a Seagate GoFlex attached on one port and a Apple TB 27" monitor on the other port. The monitor will flicker badly at times (does not happen on a competing board and a MacBook Pro) while the Seagate drive will "disappear" and requires a power on/off before being recognized again.thewhat - Tuesday, September 18, 2012 - link
It would be great if you could test with Speedfan whether the fan speed can be controlled independently for every header.NiggaASD - Sunday, December 9, 2012 - link
Ian, I think you are wrong about Gigabyte manipulating CPU voltage readings. The voltage reading 1.068 V is probably not CPU vcore, it could be VTT(VCCIO) voltage. It is known that some GB motherboards have this "feature", that they show VTT voltage in CPU-Z. For example, my GA-P67A-UD3P-B3 board shows 1.092 V in CPU-Z as vcore when I have set VTT to 1.1 V in BIOS.