Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 (Z77) Motherboard Review

Anyone who knows of the UP7’s legacy around overclocking and top level performance will be as excited to give the motherboard and their chip of choice a good run for its money to see how much extra can be squeezed out of it. We already know that this board has got a huge amount of potential considering it holds a world record overclock of 7.102GHz with a 3770k, but let’s remember that this was achieved by a professional overclocker, namely one HiCookie and a large quantity of LN2. Sadly HiCookie was unable to fly to the UK to overclock our motherboard and for some reason insurance and LN2 was at a premium, so we’ll be sticking to something a little more conventional for our review.

Hopping into the familiar and easy to use BIOS, its time to see how far this board will take our 3770k with a H80 cooler from Corsair. We did add an extra fan to the CPU socket area for pushing past 4.7GHz as we did find the VRM heatsinks getting a little warm and a little airflow was needed around them to keep them cool under the collar.

Working on the multiplier alone we were able to get the system to boot into windows right up to 4.8GHz, but we did then start experiencing some stability issues. Dropping the multiplier down to 47 then raising the BLCK, stability eventually ran out with a BCLK of 103MHz and a final speed of 4.84GHz. We were able to get the system to boot to windows at 4.89GHz however this was not stable and a number of blue screens reflected this. We did raise the vCore a little and up past 1.4v but this did not have any effect and still resulted in BSODs.

We know already that this is a record breaking board, but sadly we were not able to get our chip as far as we thought – thoughts of hitting the 5GHz barrier left dwindling in the mist. Though we think this is all down to the processor.