Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Review

Test Setup

Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H
Intel Core i7-3770K
8GB G.Skill Trident 2400 @ 10-12-12-31
HIS HD7970 with Catalyst 12.3
Cougar CM1000 PSU
Corsair F80 SSD
Thermalright Silver Arrow
Windows 7 x64

Overclocking

Overclocking the Core i7-3770K is a breeze on the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H. The one thing you have to pay close attention to, even more than on the 2nd generation of CPUs, is the temperatures. Despite needing fewer volts than we required to attain similar speeds on the i7-2600K the heat on the i7-3770K ramps up a lot quicker as you head to the 5GHz mark. For our overclock testing today we'll be running with the following settings.

The Core i7-3770K is set to 1.32v on the vCore, and a multiplier of 48. This is within the abilities of the chip to handle without a problem, and is the kind of overclock that most people will readily attain, which is what we always aim for.

The G.Skill Memory is run at XMP settings, which in this case are 2400MHz @ 10-12-12-31. Not bad at all eh.

Lucid MVP

Lucid started a long while ago as a way to mix and match ATI and nVidia cards on the same system. As this never took off, or indeed worked properly, they have moved in to helping you gain the maximum performance out of your system. The downside is having to run your displays through the onboard outputs, so those of you/us with more esoteric setups will find themselves at a disadvantage, although it's not the end of the world because the MVP technology is as hit and miss as their original idea was, but in certain situations it really makes a difference, and that's what we'll see at the end of this review.