It's time to see how the two Gigabyte Z77 boards fair against the competitors boards. Our test setup comprises out of the following hardware :

• Intel i7-3770K CPU at 4500Mhz 1.25Vcore
• 16Gb G.Skill RipjawsZ 2133c9-11-10-27 1T
• Nvidia GTX480 290.62 drivers
• Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB HDD
• Corsair 850TX PSU

Now why run the CPU overclocked ? This is done to avoid discrepancies between board manufacturers that either stay loyal to the Intel rules regarding the Turbo function or others that trick the Turbo into a single speed for all cores. Secondly it's an extra test to see if each board can keep our ES 3770K stable at 4500Mhz during the entire test suite. The 16GB of G.Skill memory also give a little bit more strain on the IMC ( memory controller ) as the four banks are being used. For the ram timings, we only set the main timings of 9-11-10-27, command rate 1T at 1.65Vdimm. All the second and tertiary timings are set by the bios. This allows us to get an idea how tight or loose them timings are programmed by the bios engineers.

As usual we are starting off with two tests that are being used at HWBot. SuperPi 32M is a single threaded ram related test, that depends heavily on RAM bandwith and timings. Wprime 1024 is a raw CPU test. Stressing all the cores thoroughly. Any weaknesses in Vcore or such will be imminent visible.

Both Gigabyte boards leading the pack in both tests. It's known inside the OCing community that out of the box that the Giga boards timings are set pretty tight. Manual tweaking of the other boards especially with the TRSSR and tRWDR timing will boost performance up to the Giga levels. Compromise is that the ram compatibility at high speeds with the Gigabyte boards might need manual intervention of subtimings to obtain stability. But out of the box everything up to 2400mhz ran stable, with BBSE, PSC and Samsung IC based dimms. In AIDA 64 the MSI has to allow the competition to pull away. Both Gigabyte boards being master in the Read test.

Maxon's Cinebench release 10 64bit CPU test relies heavily on the CPU and less on RAM speeds and timings. The mainstream UD3H even manages to beat it's bigger brother the Z77X-UD5H. It's all in the chipset and bios lads. The extra phases and gimmicks will not unleash extra performance in daily overclocks.

In the Release 11 Cinebench, we throw in the GPU via the OpenGL test. This time the UD5H is ruling the other boards. Similar outcome for the Deep Fritz 12 chess test, both Giga boards reaching scores over 17K. The competition is not that far behind, but better is better not ?

Encoding is tested via the X264HD 4.0 test. Differences are not that big, but somehow the Z77-V Pro from Asus kept on pumping out the best FPS. PCMark Vantage tests the entire subsystem, both Giga boards, not by much, but both in front.