Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 Review: OC Oriented Orange Overkill
by Ian Cutress on March 1, 2013 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- Gigabyte
- Z77
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly donating hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with the 1250W Gold Power Supply and USB testing SSD
Thank you to Micron for providing us with the SATA SSD
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with the memory kits
Thank you to ASUS for providing us the AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit
Thank you to ECS for providing us the NVIDIA GPUs
Test Setup
Test Setup | |
Processor |
Intel Core i7-3770K Retail 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 3.5 GHz (3.9 GHz Turbo) |
Motherboards |
ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ASRock Z77 Extreme6 ASRock Z77 Extreme9 ASRock Z77 OC Formula 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 Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UP7 MSI Z77 MPower MSI Z77A-GD65 |
Cooling | Thermalright TRUE Copper |
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 |
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.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
The Z77X-UP7 is stuck between a rock and a hard place on power usage. The IR3550s it uses are very efficient for power, but having 32 on the board (and 8 working at idle) causes a little more power usage than the other OC boards across our range of tests.
POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
Boot time for the UP7 does not touch our artificial ‘sub-12 second’ ideal line, but at 14 seconds is the fasted Gigabyte Z77 board we have tested.
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Drasca - Saturday, May 4, 2013 - link
I am really getting annoyed at the insufficient documentation on PCI-E slot configurations being enabled/disabled. It makes testing a lot more difficult. Just tried orange slots 1 and 2, thinking they'd work. Nope. Tried a single card in slot 2 orange. Nope. It is likely disabled on default. There is no mention of this in the very short multi language manual Gigabyte provides. I've tried the Asus Maximus V Extreme a few weeks ago, and while I didn't know about it-- at least the thing provided a configuration card and table documented in the depths of its manual. No such documentation is provided by Gigabyte.Time to try population all slots at once.