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Today we are going to look at the Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH which is aimed at the mainstream market. It boasts an impressive feature set which includes dual thunderbolt connectors and Gigabyte’s latest Ultra Durable 5 technology. The ‘P’ in the model number tells us that it features the Ultra Durable 5 technology which differs from the ‘D’ used for Ultra Durable 4
Other interesting features include a full complement of USB 3.0 ports,
PCI Express 3.0 and various overclocking technologies that should let us
squeeze a lot more power out of the i7-3770K that we’ll be using for
testing today.
Gigabyte Intel Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX Motherboard (GA-Z77X-UP4-TH)
Price $181.05
The ECS Z77H2-A2X motherboard is compatible with Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs. It has four DDR3 memory slots up to 2800MHz in its top overclocked mode, there's two PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, four Serial ATA 3.0 ports (and two Serial ATA 2.0 ports), Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, and all of the other features that an enthusiast would expect from a top-end Intel motherboard.
The ECS Z77H2-A2X motherboard also carries the other "special features" from the vendor like a super alloy choke, ECS Nonstop Technology, Gold "4" Ever, Lucid Virtu Universal MVP, M.I.B. X, 15u Gold Contact, etc.
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ECS Z77H2-A2X LGA1155 Intel Z77 Motherboard
Price $210.97
If you are a gamer, lack space for your next gaming build and infatuated with the colors black and red then I think we have your very next motherboard on hand. It is the new Fatal1ty Z77 Professional-M from Asrock.
A gaming motherboard marketed by a gamer for gamers. The Asrock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional-M Z77 motherboard has the making to being a big hit with the masses as it offers a great many features for less than of the ASUS Gene series. When a mainboard like this comes along it may be a hit with the gamers but it has to overclock well to be a hit with the enthusiast crowd.
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Price $239.99
Today we put one of the most interesting of the ASUS boards under the microscope. The Maximus V GENE Z77, a pint sized mATX product that packs a ridiculous number of features into a compact design. A few notable features on the ASUS Maximus V GENE Z77 include: SupremeFX III audio, LucidLogix Virtu MVP, GameFirst, Intel Gigabit LAN, mPCIe Combo, Extreme Engine Digi+ II, PCI-E 3.0, and SLI/CrossFire On-Demand.
ASUS has included a handy utility with the GENE to automatically overclock the system called CPU Level Up. CPU Level Up allows for quick and easy CPU overclocking by simply enabling the feature in the BIOS where there are three levels available for our 3770K: 4.2GHz, 4.4GHz, and 4GHz. Once you select one, the board resets and both a CPU and memory overclock are applied. The result is a boost from stock speed (optimized defaults, Turbo enabled) of 3,900Mhz to an instant 4,600Mhz with no effort whatsoever! Not only do we have a very nice CPU overclock with CPU Level Up, but the GENE also gave a modest overclock to the memory with 1866Mhz at 11-13-13-35 1T. This is among the best auto overclocks we have seen to date. The system was rock stable at 4.6Ghz while using the CPU Level Up feature and we were able to run all stress tests and benchmarks without any issue. For reference load, Vcore was at 1.328v and load temperatures in the mid 70s for the auto OC of 4.6Ghz.
The last thing we tested was how the 3770K would overclock while undervolted. At 1.1V Vcore, we could push the chip to 4.3GHz with temps averaging 46C after an hour of load. This could be a good option for folders or those running low power, low heat machines.
All in all, Ivy Bridge overclocking really is quite easy in comparison to Sandy bridge-E for example since there are less variables involved. The GENE was a pleasure to work with and the BIOS was virtually bug free.
With a brand new platform, growing pains often exist but users will be happy to know that one of the only issues they will encounter will be the crazy heat omitted by an overclocked Ivy Bridge chip. We thought that ASUS did such a good job with the GENE that we are left wondering what they have left up their sleeve for the flagship Maximus V Extreme Z77.
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Price $199.99
Today we will be taking a look at what Gigabyte offer at the low-end via the M-ATX Z77MX-D3H motherboard. The Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H LGA1155 motherboard features Ultra Durable 4 components and seeks to provide a stepping stone for those wanting to build a compact Intel Z77 system on a budget. On Gigabyte Intel Z77 motherboards, Gigabyte have implemented dual BIOS so that even if there is a power surge or another type of fault – the secondary BIOS is used and avoids having a complete system shutdown. Anti-surge ICs have also been included to prevent power surges from taking place.
Overclocking with Ivy Bridge is identical to Sandy Bridge. It is achieved by altering the multiplier rather than the BCLK. So the BCLK stays at 100MHz and the multiplier is modified. The Intel Core i5 3750K CPU managed to overclock up to 45 – 4.5GHz from 3.40GHz, a 32% overclock. This is a significant increase and required 1.38 vcore. Temperatures at 4.5GHz with 1.38v rose to approx. 75C across all cores.
The performance benchmarks revealed that this motherboard can offer similar and in some cases, better performance. Overclocking as per other reviews identified some key advantages were video encoding and raw CPU processing power is concerned.
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Price $141.44
The MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard is certainly a good looking motherboard with new cooling heatsinks and traditional black and blue style layout. It supports both Ivy Bridge as well as Sandy Bridge CPUs. The MSI Z77A-GD65 have 4 memory slots with support up to 32GB of memory running upto 2667MHz. The inclusion of PCI Express Gen 3 is great, because it provides a 2X faster transfer rate than the previous generation.
MSI always has a popular product at hand with the GD65 series motherboards. It sits in-between mainstream and extremely high-end, both performance and pricing wise. What you get is a very versatile motherboard with some enthusiast options like the onboard buttons, USB 3.0, voltage monitoring and extra SATA3 ports.
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Price $169.99
The board also has Dual Intelligent Processors with DIGI+ VRM support. As with many of the higher end ASUS motherboards it has 12 phase power for the processor and 4 phase power for iGPU. Today we plan on testing the board in an overclocked state. There was no problem achieving a 4.8ghz overclock with the P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 and Core i7 2600k processor but we have done this before with many other motherboards.
Today we decided to test the ‘OC Tuner’ option. This automatically configures the board and processor to a ‘safe’ overclocked setting. The board restarted a few times and it ended up with the settings above (4.43ghz – 103mhz bus speed). As we are using expensive Kingston 2400mhz rated QUAD Channel memory, we increased the memory multipler to 2,200mhz.
The Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 Motherboard has impressed us during extensive testing over the last week. I really do rate the ASUS UEFI interface as the best on the market, it is extremely intuitive to navigate and offers a wide variety of voltage and timings to squeeze out every last ounce of performance.
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Price $188.99
The ASUS P9X79 Deluxe LGA 2011 motherboard does a good job of ticking all the right boxes. Going over it, we've got good performance out of the box that's made better by a strong overclock. On the design side of things we've got a good layout - eight DIMM slots, support for three dual slot video cards and a really strong lineup of features. The P9X79 Deluxe is a really good option at the moment for people who are looking at going down the path of an ASUS board, want a strong feature set, good overclocking potential and a really nice bundle.
Moving inside the box to look at the bundle, we've got everything needed to get up and running along with a few extras including the BT 3.0 header and an antenna to accompany it.
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Price $359.99
The Z68A-GD65 (G3) motherboard has some nice features such as UEFI BIOS, Military class components, PCI Express 3.0, OC Genie II, InstantOC, SATA 6Gb/s and THX TruStudio PRO audio. There is a OC genie button embeded on the motherboard. Just press it and it will automatically overclock your CPU, (iGPU) and memory thus incresaing the overall PC performance. The UEFI BIOS allows for a lot of various overclock settings so we can clearly see that this motherboard is aimed towards overclockers.
I would recommend the Z68A-GD65G3 LGA1155 motherboard to anyone who wants a really stable and extremely well performing motherboard.
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Price $230.24
Today we continue our walk down the LGA2011 road and bring you another highly anticipated board from ASUS: the Sabertooth X79.
Looking at the design concepts of the Sabertooth X79 there are a few distinguishing features that stand out with the first feature being TUF Thermal Armor. TUF Thermal Armor utilizes the concept of a wind tunnel by providing direct airflow through the heat-critical components of the board. With improved cooling comes improved monitoring though TUF Thermal Radar's 12 onboard temperature sensors and 8 controllable fan headers that are used to bring the Sabertooth's thermal management to a whole new level.
The last and probably our favourite feature of the Sabertooth X79 is Ultimate Durability. ASUS contracted an independent ISO and IEC/IECO certified lab to test the board’s VRM components to United States Military Standard and to show confidence in this quality, ASUS also added 2 years to the warranty for a total of 5 years.
ASUS has included a handy utility with the Sabertooth to automatically overclock the system: OC Tuner. OC Tuner allows for quick and easy CPU overclocking simply by enabling the feature in the BIOS. The board resets once you select OK and both a CPU and memory overclock are applied. The result is a boost from stock speed (optimized defaults) of 3,600Mhz to an instant 4,297Mhz on an i7 3960X with no effort whatsoever! Not only do we have a very nice CPU overclock with OC Tuner, but the Sabertooth also overclocked the RipjawsX to 2,022Mhz (9-11-10) as well. This is the best auto overclock we have seen to date of all the boards reviewed thus far.
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Price $287.99
The Gigabyte X79 UD7 motherboard uses a black PCB with orange color scheme and incorporates advanced overclocking features. You'll notice later on in the review that Gigabyte placed a series of voltage read points, controls for adjusting the processor ratio and BCLK on the fly, as well as dip-switches to change the PWM frequency in the lower right corner of the board.
Power to the CPU is delivered through a 20-phase VRM that uses POSCAP low-profile capacitors, while the additional current required by 4-way GPU setups is delivered through a series of angled SATA power plugs placed on the lower side of the board.
The uEFI BIOS is really handy to use and easy to navigate. Next to that it makes common functions really fail proof, features like flashing a BIOS is done in a jiffy and all variables can be managed and monitored really easy. A massive improvement over the classic BIOS alright.
The Gigabyte X79 UF7 motherboard is an impressive motherboard. It's feature rich, a great overclocker and has downright gorgeous looks. If you are a novice overclocker and go for easy, flick the OC button at the rear IO backplate and it will get you an instant performance boost. Overclocking itself with the new 3D BIOS is fun as well, it really is an easy to work in environment. Gigabyte implemented two uEFI BIOSes by the way, you can can switch in-between them (say a normal and high performance profile), good stuff.
For overclocking itself we reached 4800 MHz in a matter if minutes and 5 GHz after a while. That last step did need some fine-tuning though. Mind you though that we work with vanilla picked engineering sample CPUs, we can never guarantee you'll achieve the same results at home.
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Price $289.99
Our test bench has seen a flood of Z68-based enthusiast motherboards this fall and ASRock added their flagship Z68 Extreme 7 Gen 3 board to the top of the pile for testing. The Extreme 7 Gen 3 pulls out all the stops for extreme enthusiasts and ultra overclockers by arming this board with next-gen PCI-E 3.0 support and an NVIDIA NF200 chip to allow users to run dual graphics cards at PCI-E x16/x16 mode and three graphics cards at x16/x8/x8 respectively.
The Z68 Extreme 7 Gen 3 motherboard was able to handle multiple types of tasks and operations that we evaluated during the benchmarking portion of this review. While the gaming results were a bit inconsistent, I was able to determine that this motherboard is a superior performer in several areas including CPU performance, overclocking, and general PC tasks.
I have a feeling that I was able to test the board with multiple graphics cards that I would have seen the truly gaming capabilities of this board.
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Price $325.30
The ASRock A55 Pro3 FM1 motherboard is based on AMD's A55 FCH (Fusion Controller Hub) chip, and is the little brother to the A75 FCH. This motherboard provides CrossfireX support, and not just between the APU and a discrete HD6000 series GPU (models up to HD6670), but is also capable between two higher end cards should you choose. I think ASRock hammered out a pretty good motherboard with the A55 Pro3. It offers the end user some room to grow, or even room to experiment with overclocking by proving to be quite capable should you so desire and providing quite a lot for the price. The money saved could easily be the difference in upgrading to a higher end APU or the difference in having 8GB of DDR3 instead of 4GB.
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Price $74.99
The ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard is more than capable of delivering some really good performance out of the box that's made better by a strong overclock. On the design side of things we've got a good layout - eight DIMM slots, support for three dual slot video cards and a really strong lineup of features.
Moving inside the box to look at the bundle, we've got everything needed to get up and running along with a few extras including the BT 3.0 header and an antenna to accompany it.
The Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard is a really good option at the moment for people who are looking at going down the path of an ASUS board, want a strong feature set, good overclocking potential and a really nice bundle, but don't want to go quite to the extreme that the Rampage IV Extreme offers.
The board is just very typical ASUS, and really, if you've used ASUS boards you will know that's only a good thing. The UEFI BIOS is also one of the most refined on the market and while nowhere near as insane as the Rampage IV Extreme BIOS, there's an excellent amount of options that help offer us a really strong overclock.
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Price $359.99
The TUF Sabertooth X79 from ASUS is designed with that all too familiar military feel to it, styled in the very same color as the earlier models with the ceramic design and feel to it, we can see a lot of resemblances alright. This all new LGA2011 motherboard will be powered by a 8+2+2+2 phase Digi+ VRM power design. One of the hip features of the X79 / SBE platform is quad-channel memory. Though nothing has been as rock solid as Intel's 64-bit memory controllers a lot certainly happened.
What should be a prominent feature of the X79 chipset update is the inclusion of PCI Express Gen 3. In a nutshell, PCI Express Gen 3 provides a 2X faster transfer rate than the previous generation, this delivers capabilities for next generation extreme gaming solutions. Good news for Sandy Bridge-E based platforms is overclockability. The original Sandy Bridge processors at the default baseclock (BLCK) were rather horrible to overclock. It has a lot to do with how the processor deals with the embedded graphics subsystem.
If you were lucky you'd be able to increase the baseclock maybe 5 to 10 MHz multiplied at best. This is why the K and now X model processors have been introduced, easy overclocking by increasing the multiplier up-to a multiplier of 57.
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Price $287.99
Today we're looking at the ASUS M5A97 Evo and this is one of the more interesting boards we've looked at due to the fact it carries with it a price tag of only $119 US.
With support for the new FX series of AMD processors along with being part of the new 900 series chipsets, this could be a really great option for people who want to get in on the AMD FX fun without breaking the bank. This looks to be very much a board that represents what the AMD platform is all about with some strong features and a really aggressive price tag.
The first thing we need to do, though, is check out the package to see what's going on in that department. Once we've done that we'll start to move closer into the motherboard itself to see just what the ASUS M5A97 Evo offers.
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Price
$119.99 $114.99
The ASRock 890 FX Delxue 5 motherboard features 3-Way CrossFireX support, USB 3.0, SATA6, onboard power/reset buttons, Dr. Debug, and many others.
The BIOS is a non-standard BIOS that I’m used to. It’s actually a GUI interface and even allows you to use your mouse.To overclock we first attempted to use the ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility, but didn’t find this to work, so we just booted up the BIOS and did a simple overclock from 3.3GHz to 3.8GHz by adjusting the CPU Frequency from 200MHz to 230MHz, I’m sure this board could handle more, but I didn’t want to push it.
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Price $216.73
The MSI Z68A GD65 G3 motherboard is another step in motherboard evolution. The MSI Z68A integrates the newest technology to future proof your system. The main feature being the first in the market with PCI Express Generation 3. We have been sitting on PCIe 2.x for 4 years now which limited us to 16GB/s bandwidth. The new PCIe 3.0 technology will double the bandwidth to 32GB/s leaving tons of room for the future video cards. Standard features include the Intel Z68 chipset. This supports the newest 1155 Intel Sandy Bridge Processors. Memory support is up to 32GB of 2133 MHz (OC) DDR3 RAM. The MSI Z68A-GD65 G3 also comes with the Military Class II technology. Their "Mil Spec" uses Hi-c CAPs, Super Ferrite Chokes, and Solid State Capacitors for extreme stability. The Z68A uses the newest UEFI with the ClickBIOS II software for a full GUI within the Windows environment. There are 4 total SATA III ports(2 being Marvell controlled, 2 being Intel controlled) and 4 Intel controlled SATAII ports. 2 USB 3.0 ports are integrated in the back panel I/O while there is expansion for 2 more with the included internal connector. Integrated audio uses the Realtek ALC892 chipset.
The MSI Z68A GD65 G3 motherboard is an excellent board that covers a wide range of markets when you break down the features. The price is also in that sweet spot that can sway just about any buyer into it's direction. Purchasing the MSI Z68A-GD65(G3) motherboard ensures top quality, extensive features, and a bit of future proofing.
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Price $230.24
The Lynx platform, otherwise known as Llano for desktop, is out in full force now. The new chipset offers something of an alternative to low-end Sandy Bridge systems with comparable CPU power and extremely heightened GPU power. These APUs don't themselves a system make, however, and all the usual manufacturers have been providing a plethora of motherboards in which to place your new Lynx APU. In this article Benchmark Reviews is taking a look at the MSI A75MA-G55 motherboard.
The MSI A75MA-G55 sports the new FM1 socket which takes Llano APUs. Currently the two available are the A8-3850 and the A6-3650, which come ready to rock with Radeon HD discrete level graphics. The MSI A75MA-G55 Motherboard supports up to 32GB of DDR3 RAM in its four DIMM slots. The A75 chipset supports RAM speeds of up to 1866MHz. This a significant increase as Intel's Sandy Bridge only supports RAM speeds up to 1333MHz.
Overclocking the Lynx platform is quite a bit more difficult than it was on the previous generation of AMD platforms.
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Price $99.99
The EVGA Z68 FTW motherboard is the flagship product in the Z68 range. It is beefy in features and physical size as this motherboard follows the EATX Form Factor at 30cm by 26 cm wide. That means you'll need a chassis that supports that specific format. The motherboard has a delicious 6 PCI Express x16 slots, along with a number of jumpers that can disable one or more of them (handy in extreme overclock sessions). The EVGA Z68 FTW is a motherboard that has a 12-phase PWM circuitry and dual 8-pin CPU power connectors to keep current flowing stable at even the highest overclocks. Funky to see is the 90 degrees angled 24-pin power plug and features like triple BIOS. It doesn't stop there though, no Sir. You may pop in DDR3 2133 MHz memory, it has 2 SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, 4 SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors, dual Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, 7.1 HD audio channel and eSATA, plus a debug LED and Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons. Overclocking itself was a breeze, you can manually select how to overclock, preferably you simply increase the Turbo multipliers and find a corresponding stable CPU voltage with it. We have an Intel 2600K processor, our limit on this processor is varying from 4800 to 5000 MHz differing per motherboard. With this eVGA motherboard we had a stable 4900 MHz and as you have seen we included the results in our benchmark suite. Superb cooling and better yield CPUs will no doubt go higher easily on this awesome motherboard.
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Price $273.63
