GIGABYTE Z77X-UP4 TH (Intel Z77) Motherboard Review

Introduction

The GIGABYTE Z77X-UP4 TH falls into the same category as the recently looked at ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt. Both were boards we received last year, but due to the fact that one of the major focus points of the board was the inclusion of Thunderbolt, we decided to put it on the back burner.

Many months on, though, it seems we're no closer to Thunderbolt really becoming mainstream due to driver problems under Windows and a general long lead time for approval of devices. It seemed that it was just finally time to blow the dust off some of these boards and see just what we could get out of them, even if we didn't get the chance to focus heavily on the Thunderbolt side of things.

If you want to read a bit more into our thoughts on what's going on with Thunderbolt then I highly recommend that you check out the introduction of the above mentioned ASUS review. Saying that we'll be covering the Thunderbolt and what's going on with it in a bit more detail when we get to the final thoughts at the end of the review.

For now we've got to do a few things. The first is we'll check out the box of our GIGABYTE Z77X-UP4 TH and see what is going on with the bundle here today. Once we've done that we'll move onto the board itself where we'll cover the main features before heading into the BIOS to check out what's going on with the 3D BIOS. We'll then take the chance to cover our test system, the boards you'll see in our graphs today and finally before we get into the benchmarking side of things we'll see how we went with overclocking. For now, though, let's get into the box and bundle.

Package

Looking at the front and back of the box it's very much a standard affair. We've got some of the main details on the front including mention of Ultra Durable 5 and of course the fact we've got Thunderbolt support. You can also see a push on the 3D Power All Digital Engine and 3D Dual UEFI BIOS.

The back of the box covers some of the main features in more detail with a big push on the Ultra Durable 5 side of things being covered across the top. You can see we go into a bit more detail on the Thunderbolt support which in this case is the inclusion of dual Thunderbolt ports. The All Digital Power setup is mentioned along with some information on the 3D BIOS.

Carrying the UP4 name we knew that the bundle wasn't going to be huge. You can see above it's a fairly standard setup with some paperwork, driver CD, four SATA cables, I/O back plate and finally an SLI bridge.