- Joined
- Jan 13, 2010
- Messages
- 2,832
- Motherboard
- Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
- CPU
- i7-3770K @4.2-4.4GHz
- Graphics
- GTX 660 Ti
- Mobile Phone
This might be a bit off topic, as we presume most of you aren’t professional overclockers, but Gigabyte has released a sneak peek of its upcoming GA-Z77X-UP7 motherboard which has been designed to meet the demands of professional overclockers. That said, we can see some of you wanting this board simply due to the extra x16 PCI Express slots on offer.Since Computex last month, Gigabyte has overhauled the colour scheme, as well as fitted the board with yet another new heatink design, one that looks rather neat, especially for a board like this. Aesthetics aside, the Z77X-UP7 is as you might’ve gathered by now, Gigabyte’s high-end Z77 motherboard and it has a wide range of features that goes with the territory.
For starters, it has no less than 32 power phases using the PowIRstage’s which is really only useful for professional overclockers that use LN2 or even liquid Helium to overclock their systems on a competitive level. The board has four x16 PCI Express 3.0 slots that are connected to a PLX bridge, in other words, the four slots are sharing the 16 lanes of bandwidth available from the CPU. The four slots can operate in dual x16 mode or in four x8 mode. There’s also a fifth x16 slot on the board which appears to connected directly to the CPU, bypassing the PLX bridge, as well as two x1 PCI Express slots.
Other features targeting overclockers include Voltage measuring points, manual overclocking buttons and a few switches on the board that we don’t know what they’re for as yet. More general features include the standard two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports from the Intel chip, as well as a pair of Marvell SATA 6Gbps controllers that add an extra four ports, an Etron USB 3.0 controller that adds two additional front USB 3.0 ports – note that this controller is OS X compatible with the modified NEC/Renesas drivers – two more front USB 3.0 ports via the Intel chipset, an mSATA slot and pin-headers for an additional four USB 2.0 ports.
Around the back the Z77X-UP7 sports a PS/2 port, six USB 3.0 ports of which four are via the dreaded (for OS X at least) VLI VL800 host controller, dual Gigabit Ethernet – via an Intel controller and a currently unknown secondary controller, but it’s likely to be Realtek or Atheros – 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out via Realtek’s ALC898 as well as a D-sub, DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI output.
The Z77X-UP7 should be at least a reasonably CustoMac friendly board, even though it might not be perfect. We know it’ll be a costly alternative, but for those that need the extra PCI Express slots and want to stick with the Z77/Ivy Bridge platform, there aren’t that many options out there to choose from and they’re all quite costly, high-end models.
Source: Gigabyte Facebook
Last edited by a moderator:
