CPU Performance Results

I spent a week with the Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH 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 Z77X-UP5 TH ended up in the top region here and, it is, as far as Intel Z77 Express products go, sitting in second place.

wPrime

wPrime is much more CPU-focused, but memory plays its role as well. In this test, the numbers were very different, with the Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH on the low end of Intel Z77 Express results - quite disappointing.

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 Z77X-UP5 TH was again underwhelming.

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 Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH scored fairly well, sitting just ahead of the Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3.

HandBrake Encoding

Handbrake is used for encoding testing, and provided results were similar to the previous benchmarks, with the Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH sitting a bit behind again.

CineBench Encoding

In Cinebench, the Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH performed much more like I had expected - actually fairly high up the charts. It seems that, although this board is very similar to its US5H sister, it really is quite different in many ways.