Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 review - Introduction

Gigabyte has released a new flagship product in its Z77 series of motherboards. Back at Computex in Taiwan it was already shown, albeit it certainly looked different back then being an engineering slash beta design. It promised a lot though. The Z77X-UP7 is made for all kinds of extreme things, quad-GPU gaming, tweaking, overclocking, heck it even has an liquid Nitrogen switch for the pro overclockers. 

This motherboard comes even with an astounding 32-phase VRM design. Oh and is 10 SATA ports enough for ya ? Or what about five PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots dual-Gigabit LAN, 4-way SLI / CrossFireX multi-GPU support ?

No my kind Sir or Madam, it does not stop there as you'll also spot wicked control buttons, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and yes, even a mSATA SSD slot. Now this board falls under Gigabyte's UD5 class, and GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 5 motherboards are especially optimized for water cooled systems and overclocked Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 'K' SKU CPUs due to their exceptionally low operating temperatures. They make the perfect match for anyone looking to push their system to limits, as Gigabyte motherboard business unit states.

•  CPU Support - Intel 22nm 3rd and 2nd gen Core CPUs
•  CPU Socket - LGA 1155
•  Chipset - Intel Z77 chipset
•  Graphics Interface - 2 PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot (or 4 PCI-E 3.0 x8) + 1 PCI-E 3.0 x16
•  Display Interface - HDMI, DVI, RGB, Display Port
•  Memory Type - 2 Channel DDR3
•  Memory DIMM - 4*DDR3
•  Expansion Slots - 2*PCI-E x 1
•  SATA connectors - 6*SATA 3 + 4*SATA 2
•  SATA RAID - RAID 0,1,5,10
•  USB - 10*USB3.0+4*USB2.0
•  Audio / LAN - 8-channel HD / GbE LAN*2
•  Form Factor (mm) - E-ATX (305x264)

Z77 is of course the Intel chipset predominantly released for Ivy Bridge based processors. These motherboards will have a slightly altered feature set and thus support the Ivy Bridge CPUs from Intel. Good to know however is that Z77 also supports Sandy Bridge Socket 1155 based processors.

Gigabyte  will offer a good variety of Z77 products as well and today we review that Z77X-UP7 in combination with Intel's Core i7 3770K processor. 
Have a peek at what the Z77X-UP7 motherboard is all about. I can tell you that it looks awesome cute and feature rich alright. Next page please.