Gigabyte GA-Z77-UP4 TH (Z77) Motherboard Review

Built onto a full ATX sized board, first impressions are very good, with a subtle yet very stylish design. Built onto a black PCB with mostly black slots and ports, a few areas are highlighted to add contrast in grey and white.

Looking around the socket area, we see that there is a reasonable amount of space surrounding the socket itself, which in turn allows for the vast majority of coolers to easy fit on with no issues in the slightest. On top of the Mosfets there are two black passive heatsinks with a brushed metal cover to them. These are some of the more stylish heatsinks that we have seen in recent months.

Moving down to the Z77 chipset, we find again a passive heatsink that follows a very similar design to those we saw above.

Further up the board, four memory slots are found alternating between black and grey in colour. The Z77X-UP4 TH supports up to 32GB of DDR3 RAM with support for 1600/1333/1066MHz modules. With this being an Intel board, we also find support for XMP profiles meaning that faster speeds are capable with supported kits. Just out of shot to the lower left of the memory lanes we find a USB3.0 header.

Starting from above the expansion slots, first of all we have an mSATA slot which allows for drive caching when enabled via the IRST control panel. Below this we find three PCI-e x1 slots which all conform to the PCI-e 2.0 standard, then three PCI-e 3.0 x16 lanes. The top lane runs at full x16 speeds, with the middle one running at x8 speeds and the bottom running at x4. We will point out that in order to use the x4 slot, an Ivy Bridge CPU has to be installed and when used, the x8 slot will run at x4 and the main x16 lane will run at x8 as bandwidth is shared between the lanes, however we do still have support for up to three way CrossFireX or SLI multi GPU setups. Nestled in the middle of the PCI-e lanes we also find the two BIOS chips, labelled M_BIOS and B_BIOS (Main & Backup).

At the bottom of the board we have the usual array of front panel headers, including front panel audio, three USB2.0 headers, COM, TPM header, two system fans and the front panel led and power/reset headers.

On the side of the board there are a total of six SATA ports; the four black ports to the left all support SATA 3Gb/s devices whilst the two to the right have full support for SATA 6Gb/s drives. When combined there is full RAID support from the chipset however performance will vary depending on connected drives as expected.

Turning round to the I/O panel, we find a total of six USB3.0 ports, PS/2 combo, VGA, DVI, HDMI, Gigabit LAN, 8ch audio and SPDIF. The new addition(s) that you’ll notice are the appearance of two new ports between the audio and USB. These two ports are the new Thunderbolt interface, which we’ll take a look into in a little more detail later in the review.

Whilst we’re looking around the board and talking about the new interface on offer, we might as well point out its controller. Tucked away behind the two Thunderbolt ports we find the Intel DSL3510L chip which supports both mini-DisplayPort and Thunderbolt monitors and also Thunderbolt compatible storage devices. We do note that when the DVI port on the rear I/O is used, the second Thunderbolt port (one to the left in the above picture) is only able to support Thunderbolt storage devices.