Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 Overclocking Motherboard Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,847 words · ~9 min read
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this video is brought to you by Cooler Master featuring The siden 240mm
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all-in-one CPU water cooling system check it out at www. coolermaster
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usa.com welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Gigabyte z77x
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up7 so their tagline for this guy is a
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new Legend is born and I believe that has something to do with the fact that
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this board is now the host of well at
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least when they printed the Box these things change all the time but is now the host of the
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world sorry for that noise of the world record
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7102 GHz overclock on a
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3770k so there you go they've got a little badge on their box to tell you
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all about how the overclocking features of this board are not one of those all
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show and noo type Affairs but actually
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delivering results in the competitive overclocking scene so we're going to go
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ahead and we see the board first but I'm going to make you guys sit through the
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accessories before we actually check it out lots of accessories there are many
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many accessories so accessory number one is their PCI Express Bluetooth and Wi-Fi
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card go ahead and give you guys a look at this what's cool about this is you
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actually don't have to use it on Gigabyte boards you can use it on a different board should you so desire so
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you can carry that with you as your system evolves and changes over
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potentially the years okay so there's the antennas that go with them they're
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just little Standalone antennas you stick them wherever you want next up
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we've got all of the connectivity this board does support four-way SLI so it
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comes with a four-way SLI Bridge a three-way SLI Bridge a two-way flexible
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Crossfire bridge and presumably there we go a two-way flexible SLI Bridge all of
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these are black which means they will actually go with your computer color
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scheme whereas I've seen sort of brutal ones in the past that don't match the
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board that you actually bought it with we've also got lead outs for the voltage
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monitoring that is built into the board you don't have to solder anything as
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well as a USB cable that is I believe for the Wi-Fi Bluetooth card it comes
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with a 3 and 1/2 in front USB 3 Bay so
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if your case doesn't have USB 3 natively you can add it no problem it also comes
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with one of their one of Gigabyte's awesome eat bracket so that goes in a
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PCI bracket and includes a Molex power connector and then they also include a
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Molex to dual SATA
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Internal SATA adapter so you can just plug in two external drives easily just
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to the back of your system without any extra adapters or enclosures or anything
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like that you just plug them in and go finally we've got six SATA 3 6 gbit per
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second cables three right angle and three straight an IO
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Shield there you go color coded for your convenience and all the manuals and
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whatnot that you will need now let's get into the board board
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itself so Gigabyte really is throwing everything at this board in terms of
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Technology whether it's performance related cooling related or even looks
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related it looks really really sharp just like many of their other OC boards
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and give me a moment to get this adjusted so I can actually show you guys what it looks like this is not an XL ATX
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board which I personally like to see I want to see that functionality put into
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a form factor that most cases can actually accept but they've still
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managed to make it four-way SLI and four-way Crossfire compatible now the
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problem with z77 boards that are able to run four-way configurations is that
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usually they use Bridge chips that while they increase the bandwidth available to
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the slots can have a negative impact on
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latency so if you're going to run a single graphics card configuration what
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you would want to do is use this black Port right here very Innovative very
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cool approach from Gigabyte this Blackport goes natively directly to the
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CPU PCIe 16x and will have no additional
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latency involved so you only have to use these orange ports if you're running
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dual Graphics awesome love to see it cooling wise they've changed up the
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approach a little bit we've seen a lot of cooling solutions implemented on
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motherboards that are more for show rather than for the actual thermal
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dissipation remember it's all about surface area so the cooler on here uses
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a very thin dense heat sink arrangement
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in order to dissipate more heat to the surrounding air and not necessarily just
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be for looks so there's one for the South Bridge area one for the North
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Bridge area and then one around the 32 phase power design so that is part of
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what allows the CPU to get such stable power however just throwing more power
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phases at a board is not necessarily going to improve the performance in any
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meaningful way you actually have to build good phases so Gigabyte is using
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the same I truly all digital pwm so
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there's nothing analog left in the power delivery system that is actually on act
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the board that I'm using the x79 S up5 which is an x79 board whereas this
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is a z77 so a different socket otherwise I'd probably consider using something
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like this and that is how you're able to push the clocks up on those CPUs even
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under extreme conditions such as extremely low temperature which is
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required for boosting things up to that level anyway so in terms of the actual
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connectors on the board we've got two 8 Pin CPU connectors up here at the top
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left in their ideal locations one 24 pin connector over here on the far right in
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its ideal location front USB 3 is on the right hand edge of
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the board as well as the bottom so depending which approach you prefer you
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can definitely go ahead and leverage either of those it includes an msata
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Port so slot five or port five over here will be disabled if you use it
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personally for a desktop system I'd usually just add a an SSD or a drive
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rather than using msata but there you go you have the option auxiliary power is
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provided by a SATA connector here I do recommend using this if you're going to
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install three graphics cards or more uh we've got six SATA 3 6 GB per second
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ports these two are powered by Intel these two are powered by Marvel chipset
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and then four SATA 2 3 GB per second ports there's the debug LED as well as
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controls for the main BIOS as well as the secondary BIOS so it does have a
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dual bio system with hardware switches allowing you to decide which one you
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want to boot from your front panel connectors are here this red USB port
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supports on off which is cool because
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your devices will charge whether it's a phone or a tablet even if your
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computer's powered off and your front panel audio is right over here the board
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supp concludes support for the latest core I3 i5 and i7 processors on the LGA
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1155 platform so there are seven onboard fan headers one two pwm up here at the
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top a third pwm here on the right hand side a fourth fifth and fifth pwm down
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here on the bottom and then two three pin connectors down here on the bottom
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so that means you can control all these fans through the BIOS rather than using
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a third party controller or whatever else I mean this is the stuff that I
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glazed over cuz it seems basic now but LGA 1155 does support up to four dims of
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dual Channel DDR3 memory with up to 8 gig dims so you can put in a total of 32
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gigs of RAM should you so desire this board does feature the latest Ultra
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durable technology meaning the 2x copper PCB as well as their new fiberglass uh
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or glass fabric rather not fiberglass glass fabric PCB which is humidity
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resistant so it's going to be great for damp environments where there's lots of
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humidity in the air as well as sort of other regular environments little nice
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touches like this I like to see so they've got more cooling on the back of the board for the moset and that will
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help particularly with chassis such as the entech uh 1100 where it there's
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actually sort of space on the back where some air flow can come through as well
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as using screws for all the built-in heat sinks it means they're not likely
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to come loose in travel or if there's any if the board underg goes any kind of
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a flex um they'll stay on and the board
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will actually function as intended so I think that pretty much wraps it up I
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mean there's okay there's other weird stuff that I okay so you guys can tune
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out if you're not interested in the crazy stuff so here's where all the voltage checkpoints are so if you're
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doing any kind of crazy overvolting that's where you can measure them directly with a multimeter rather than
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relying on software here's where you can switch to liquid nitrogen mode clear
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seimo switches up here power as well as
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overclocking buttons so these are for directly overclocking the board they
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have a hardware interface with the board so you don't have to worry about any software and then this this gear button
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actually changes the increments that these buttons use to overclock the board
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itself the reset switch is away from all the other switches for whatever reason
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is down here in the bottom right corner I guess that's for ease of access when
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it's on a bench since reset is the one that you're typically using a lot in
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that scenario and of course the rear IO which I completely forgot it's actually
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been a long time since I've done a motherboard unboxing we haven't had a
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new platform in quite a while am3 plus and lga1155 have been with us forever 6
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USB 3. ports PS2 VGA DVI DisplayPort
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HDMI optical audio out 2 GB Ethernet and
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7.1 audio out thank you for watching this lineus techs unboxing and don't
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