GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7 (Intel Z77) Motherboard Review

Introduction

I always found myself disappointed that I never got a chance to test out the GIGABYTE X79-UD7 when it launched. I always loved the black and orange color scheme that it had. Since that opportunity never arose it was time for the waiting game to see the next board that came out following the same color scheme.

Jump forward and today we're checking out the Z77X-UP7. As soon as I heard of the UP7 tag I found myself instantly hoping that it would follow that same black and orange color scheme - as you can see in our introduction photo above, it does.

Like most companies we're seeing GIGABYTE offer some updated motherboard versions of the Z77 chipset and this is of course the latest one to hit our labs. Carrying the UP7 name of course means it's a higher end offering and sits above the other Z77 boards we've looked at from GIGABYTE.

Before we take a closer look at the board itself, though, there are a few things that we need to do. We'll be starting off by checking out the box and the contents of the package, which is quite large.

Once we've gone through the package we'll move onto the board itself and cover all the main features before we move onto the BIOS side of things, cover overclocking, check out the other boards that will be included in our graphs today before we finally get into the performance.

Package

Straight away we've got a sweet looking box which isn't too busy on the front and just instead mentions some of the main highlights that are on offer. Opening up the box we can see that the left side focus on the Ultra Durable aspect of the board which includes higher quality components throughout the board.

Moving over to the other side of the box we get a good look at the board so we know just what we're dealing with. Turning over we've got a picture of the board and an absolute wealth of information.

You can see some of the main features like 32+3+2 Phase CPU Power Design, true all Digital PWM design, OC Touch, Thin Fin Cooling along with a run down on the I/O side of things. We won't go into too much detail, though, as we'll cover this all on the next page when we take a closer look at the board.

Moving inside the box you can see the normal line up of paperwork along with the I/O shield and three SLI bridges ranging from two cards setups to four way ones. Also included although not pictured is an extended CrossFire bridge.

Moving on you can see we've got six SATA cables and two antennas for the wireless card that is included in the bundle, which can also be seen above.

Finally we finish the bundle with an eSATA header which has some cables included with it and a front panel dual port USB 3.0 header.