Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH Thunderbolt Z77 motherboard review

Conclusion

Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH is definitely one of the fastest boards among the Intel Z77 series we have tested so far. In our benchmarks, the board runs very well ahead of the competition. In fact, it performs steadily without an issue when we overclock both the CPU to 4.4GHz and the iGPU to 1.5GHz.

Features wise, this board has it all. The Dual port Thunderbolt is something that is unique to Gigabyte. There is also the Bluetooth 4 + Dual Band WiFi that adds on to the list of goodies on this board. With Virtu, you can upgrade your graphics anytime.

For users who wants more power, the board comes with a 3D BIOS which offers various options for you to fine tune your overclocking. You can also measure the voltage levels using a voltmeter at the probes next to the power on/off switch.

Overclocking can be done via software or the preferred way through the 3D UEFI BIOS. For the options please refer to page 3. In our test, we can overclock the Core i5-3570K to 4.4GHz stable with GPU set to 1.5GHz. Anything slightly above results in instability in the system. That is probably the limits of the processor.

Although thunderbolt devices and even the cable are quite expensive, the two Thunderbolt ports, which can deliver up to 10GB/s in total gives you utmost connectivity options in the future. It will come in handy when you need to transfer huge data. This is definitely very useful if you were to use the board as multimedia workstation connecting to an external encoder of H.264 and storage in RAID array.

More information about usage of Thunderbolt could be packaged so that more users are aware of the potential of thunderbolt.

In Conclusion, this board has the potential of being a low end workstation board. It has the bell and whistles to become one. I give this board our GOLD AWARD.

Pros

Dual Thunderbolt ports
Lucid Virtu

Cons

C3/C6 state must be turned off for some PSUs to work properly