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

3DMark 11

3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online.

In our gaming benchmarks, things got off to a great start with the board scoring the third best results that we have seen, only outdone by the Z77H2-AX from ECS and not surprisingly the Maximus V Gene from Asus. Whilst there was an increase in the overall score when overclocked, the difference in results was only marginal.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics intense games on the market.

At full HD resolutions we found some very strong results with 67fps achieved and the board giving a frame rate of 76fps at 1680×1050, which matches with the other top boards. We did find little difference from overclocking with only a fraction of a frame increase at 1680 and just over 1fps at full HD.