CPU Performance Results

We spent a about a week with the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H WiFi before beginning our performance testing, running various configurations and CPUs, and checking hardware compatibility. We verified our power consumption numbers using various different power supplies, and played a few hours of games with some members of the TPU community to get an overall feel for the board and to verify stability. Once completed, we tore down the system, mounted our Noctua cooler and put the board through the paces.

SuperPi

SuperPI serves as our memory-focused benchmark, being highly single-threaded. The Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi ended up on the top of the pile of all Intel products we have tested, a good showing, for sure.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. In this test, the numbers were much closer, but the Z77-UD5H WiFi was just a bit faster than the ASUS Maximus IV Gene, which ran a Sandybridge CPU @ 3.8 GHz as default. I expect all Ivybridge results to match Sandybridge CPUs with 300 MHz more than their IvyBridge counterpart.

WinRAR

Part of our motherboard benchmarking suite is the built-in benchmark that is part of the WinRAR software suite. In this test, the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi put up good numbers, actually far higher than expected as it matches some SB-E numbers.

AIDA64

We employed AIDA64's memory bench to highlight memory bandwidth. We isolate the write performance metric as it serves as a good indicator of overall memory performance. Here the numbers were quite low, however, as this is the first Z77 Express board we are testing, further testing is required before we can consider this an issue.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results much similar to the previous benchmarks, with the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H WiFi sitting nearly ten FPS ahead of our previously best SKT 1155 result.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench, the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi was a bit slower than some of the other tested SKT 1155 products on the GPU side, but the CPU portion again showed the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi as the top SKT 1155 performer, bar none.