Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH Motherboard

Conclusions

The Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH is targeted to the mainstream user who wants a motherboard with Thunderbolt ports. This motherboard also brings three PCI Express x16 3.0 slots, even though they don’t work at x16 speed when more than one video card is installed. However, this is expected on a mainstream product.

Another highlight of this motherboard includes the presence of an mSATA slot (even though it is SATA-300 and shared with one of the available SATA-300 ports); two BIOS chips; eight USB 3.0 ports; a PLX PEX8605 chip that allows performance to stay high when the Thunderbolt ports are used in conjunction with SATA-600 and USB 3.0 ports; an excellent voltage regulator circuit; and decent overclocking features, including the possibility of configuring the CPU base clock in 0.01 MHz increments.

The most obvious drawback to this motherboard is the presence of only two SATA-600 ports. The audio codec may be of concern for professionals converting analog audio to the digital format, due to its mainstream signal-to-noise ratio. (By the way, near the audio codec the manufacturer printed “108 dB.” This information is incorrect, as this audio codec presents an output signal-to-noise ratio of 97 dB. The manufacturer aknowledged this mistake and will fix this on the next production batch.)

In summary, if you are a regular user looking for a motherboard with Thunderbolt ports, the Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH may fit your needs. However, if you are a more demanding user or are building a workstation to work professionally with audio and video editing, we recommend that you consider the Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH instead.