Overclocking With Gigabyte Z77X Motherboards
Test Setup and Baseline Tests
Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective UEFI menus and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then formatted the SSD and installed Windows 7 Home Premium. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Then we disabled Auto-Updating and Windows Defender, installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared temp and prefetch data, and ran the tests.
We outfitted our motherboards with an Intel Core i7-3770K, 8GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600MHz memory, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX discrete graphics card, and an OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. We also went with a Corsair H55 Hydro liquid cooler over air cooling.
Here are some baseline test scores for the three boards:
We outfitted our motherboards with an Intel Core i7-3770K, 8GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600MHz memory, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX discrete graphics card, and an OCZ Vertex 4 SSD. We also went with a Corsair H55 Hydro liquid cooler over air cooling.
Here are some baseline test scores for the three boards:
As you can see, there isn’t much variation in the scores between these three motherboards when running at their optimized defaults. With striking precision for the most part, all three offered up solid and similar scores. One exception is the UD7 in the power consumption test, which pulled a lot more juice than the other two.
