FRONTPAGE Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H-WB Motherboard Review

Overclockers.com · Jun 28, 2012

With the release of the Ivy Bridge CPU came new chipsets, specifically Z77. No board manufacturer, including Gigabyte would miss that boat, and of course came out with their own Z77 based motherboards. Today we have a chance to review their current top of the line (that isn't a 'gaming' motherboard), the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H-WB (WiFi). Let's take a look at whats under the hood and how far she wants to push our Ivy Bridge CPU.

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EarthDog · Jun 28, 2012

A HUGE thanks to Mattno5ss for snapping the great photos for this review. :thup:

deed · Jun 28, 2012

Thanks for the review. This Motherboard has certainly caught my eye. Good color combination, price isn't bad, and has the wifi card.

The images in the review make the board look a lot better than the newegg images

wingman99 · Jun 28, 2012

Good review. Did the G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-2133 set speed and timing, volts. correctly in X.M.P mode.

EarthDog · Jun 28, 2012

The only managed to work in Auto. Im thinking its an incompatibility issue at this time. I will report back when I get 'proper' memory for the board.

wingman99 · Jun 28, 2012

Thanks i would like to see the outcome of running DDR3-2133

txus.palacios · Jun 29, 2012

Nice review as always, my fellow OCFers. Good job, ED.

Actually, this board caught my eye when my P67 Extreme4 died. I was between the UD5H and the MVG. I couldn't find any review here of the UD5H, but I saw a thread by the Leader about the MVG, so it was crystal clear for me.

PolRoger · Jun 30, 2012

Have you had any freezing/lockups in BIOS while dialing in your overclocks?

EarthDog · Jun 30, 2012

I did not experience that, no.

PolRoger · Jun 30, 2012

Your board has purple caps and no slot/gap between the ram slots but the early/original release of the ud5 has blue caps and a gap between the second and third dimm slots.

It seems like these earlier samples can experience this problem if the your o.c settings are not fully stable... probably due to the chip being under some kind of load in BIOS. If your voltage settings are stable or if you run default/stock settings it doesn't seem to happen.

EarthDog · Jul 1, 2012

Thats great information to have PolRoger.. thank you.

Yeah, outside of the memory issue, which appears to be a simple compatibility problem with the sticks Im running, this board worked out really well out of the box. The other board I have, it has frozen in the bios as well... I wonder if your theory applies to this board as well (as there sure is a bit of a load in the bios judging by temperatures).

Robert17 · Jul 6, 2012

It's been a while since I owned a Gigabyte board. Correct me if times have changed but it seemed to me, way back when, that the Gigabyte download arena was extremely slow. But it also seemed the same for Asus although I've bitten my tongue owned a couple of their boards in the past few years.

Is it my memory that is indistinct or is their download service more a pleasure to work with these days? (downloading BIOS, QVL lists, driver updates, et al, need to be simple and painless as far as I'm concerned; yes, this coming from a survivor of the 900 baud days)

Nice review. I'm still trying to discern the best direction to go for the IB upgrade that I want to perform, not writing off any MBs, just being prudent. What is your impression of this board vs. Bobnova's review of the Biostar TZ77XE4? Comparing them seems to be apples and oranges from what I read although both seem to be capable units.

EarthDog · Jul 6, 2012

Their DL section is a bit slow, but nothing heart breaking.

As far as this board vs the other one. The biostar seems capable as does this one. It really boils down to the feature set you want. For example, do you need wireless or Bluetooth? This is for you. If not, the board is still good, but there may be other cheaper boards that have the feature sets you need.

DaveB · Jul 11, 2012

As always with a build, I go as cheap as possible with the feature set I really need. So I went with the Microcenter $189 i5 3750K deal with $50 off any Z77 motherboard. I needed SLI for my pair of GTX 460 1GB cards, and kinda wanted mATX for a future transplant to a smaller case. So I picked up the i5 3750K yesterday with a Gigabyte Z77MX-D3H for only $79 after the $50 off (total $268 plus tax for the combo).

Got it running easy with the only issue being that I updated from the preloaded F5 BIOS to the latest F12 to get the Kingston DDR3-1600 running on spec. With a 15 minutes of messing around it's running at 4.5 GHz with some benches run successfully. Seems like a nice board for a budget build if you need SLI capability in a small, inexpensive package.

Here's a comparison with Cinebench scores from my i5 [email protected] GHz and the i5 [email protected] GHz. The IB beats SB even at a slightly slower clock, but both are blown away by the i7 3930K SB-E though.

wingman99 · Jul 12, 2012

I don't see the Gigabyte Z77MX-D2H on the Gigabyte site?

Do you have vcore voltage control on the Z77MX-D2H?

DaveB · Jul 12, 2012

wingman99 said:
I don't see the Gigabyte Z77MX-D2H on the Gigabyte site?

Do you have vcore voltage control on the Z77MX-D2H?

Sorry it was late and I fat-fingered the motherboard designation, it's the Z77MX-D3H. They did a review of it at Anand's a while back. And yes, it has all the standard tweaks in the BIOS.

FRONTPAGE Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H-WB Motherboard Review

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