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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madmilk - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
You're not going to find what you want in a 7-slot ATX form factor. However, dropping down your x16 GPU requirement makes possible with water cooling and a good X79 motherboard.Moving up to Xeon opens up some more options. One is this: http://www.avadirect.com/tower-server-configurator... Real PCIe 3.0 x16 Quad-SLI, plus two more PCIe 3.0 x8 and one PCIe 2.0 x4.
Getting those last PCIe lanes is very, very expensive, and completely worthless for anything but GPU compute.
JeBarr - Saturday, March 2, 2013 - link
I'm hoping for a few new motherboards with the next enthusiast platform refresh. Ideally 10 slot to make room for all the expansion cards a gamer geek could possibly use :DSamus - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
Can you use all 5 pcie x16 slots simultaneously with single-slot GPU's, obviously not in SLI?Samus - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
You answered my question above, thanks!sherlockwing - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
You said:If Gigabyte was going for more sales, from my perspective, if some of the IR3550s were removed and the system reduced to just over $300, it might get more takers
What Gigabyte does have on the market is the http://detonator.dynamitedata.com/cgi-bin/redirect...">UP5-TH for about $250.
It have the exact same PWM chip in the VRM as the UP7 (8 phase IR3563), only that UP7 runs it through a quadrupler for 32 VRM phase while UP5 don't use any so it runs only 8 IR3550 but 8*60= 480A is already overkill for Ivy Bridge.
The only other thing UP5-TH misses other than VRM phase overkill is the PLX chip, so it can't run 4 way SLI/CLX, and can only run 3 way at 8X/4X/4X. But for people running 2 cards or less it is more than enough.
UP7 is a halo product/ultra flagship just like the GTX Titan, UP-5TH is the mainstream Flagship.
IanCutress - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
Yup, we reviewed the UP4 TH: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6296/Though that goes along their Thunderbolt line. The Thunderbolt controller isn't cheap. But as mentioned the comparison is the G1.Sniper 3 with the PLX, or the Z77X-UD5H without the PLX (or Thunderbolt).
Ian
mayankleoboy1 - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
Y U no use WinRAR 4.2 ?Its much better multithreaded.
IanCutress - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
To maintain consistency with the last 18 months of benchmark results ;) Should probably do an update for Haswell later this year though.Ian
Kevin G - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
For a user putting down $400 for a motherboard, especially one aimed at overclocking and high performance, why not go the LGA 2011 route and X79? In this price range, LGA-1155 and Z77 just don't seem to be premium products in comparison.baberpervez - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
Why in the world is Gigabyte focusing on the LG1366 market? With all new cpus being LG1155 or 2011, seems counterproductive to produce a unit for an older motherboard kind. Even with my I7 960 I don' tknow why anyone would want to upgrade to this product. With triple -SLI (570s) a fourth slot is useless since the cards are only 3 way capable, but definitely worth experiementing on for 480's/580s/680s.The price is what it is, very hefty...and only serious overclockers would want to purchase this.
If Nvidia made the 570 quad sli than I would consider getting this, but there's no chance of me replacing three cards to go into a higher configuration anytime soon.
This board would have done very well a few years ago...
Just not convinced LG1366 was a good idea.