Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 Flagship Motherboard Makes an Appearance

Since Computex 2012 is ready to kick off, hands-on reports about products are already coming in, such as the one where VR-Zone speaks about Gigabyte's Z77X-UP7.

The Z77X-UP7 happens to be the new so-called “flagship” motherboard with support for Intel's latest central processing units. Flagship means the latest and greatest product in a certain category, making the way the product title is chosen a bit strange really. Even though “flagship” would imply that a device leads in terms of marketing success, high-end devices end up selling in much lower numbers than mid-range models. Thus, “flagship” denotes the best-in-class invention on the part of a company and is more a means to show what said IT player can brag about. Of course, that doesn't take away from the worth of the product, and people that have enough money to afford top-tier hardware shouldn't have a reason to be disappointed by the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7.

In fact, overclockers might find a reason to be particularly inclined towards buying it. After all, it's not every day one finds International Rectifier IR3550 VRMs (Ultra Durable 5 technology). Speaking of which, the motherboard has a 32-phase VRM design, 3D BIOS and Gigabyte 3D Power technology, enabling wide overclocking capabilities and significant energy efficiency. Other specifications include five PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (the number is achieved thanks to a PLX PCI Express switch), a pair of PCI Express x1 slots, dual-Gigabit LAN, 4-way SLI / CrossFireX multi-GPU support, the Lucid Virtu technology (switches between integrated and add-in graphics) and Realtek ALC898 audio.

Finally, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and an mSATA SSD slot are built into the platform as well. Unfortunately, the price and availability of the Gigabyte's Z77X-UP7 were not specified. “GIGABYTE Ultra Durable 5 motherboards are especially optimized for water cooled systems and overclocked Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 'K' SKU CPUs due to their exceptionally low operating temperatures, and make the perfect match for anyone looking to push their system to limits,” said Henry Kao, vice president of Gigabyte motherboard business unit.

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