The Board - Layout

I almost covered this board last month, as its orange/black color scheme would have made sense. Those clothes don't just look good though, as they serve a purpose, although their main thing is to be visually stunning. A lot of people commented on the old and favorite DFI – their tweaker-centric products were popular quite a few years ago – and how this board struck a lot of similar lines; I almost think it was intentional on Gigabyte's part. The back of the board is all black; the heatsink screws are also anodized black.


The front of the socket, although wrapped by heatsinks and DIMM slots, has a fair bit of room, so much so that insulation for extreme cooling shouldn't be that difficult. The rear of the socket has backplates for those heatsinks on the front, but clearance for aftermarket CPU cooler backplates shouldn't be a problem.


There are seven expansion slots on the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7, five of which are PCIe 3.0 slots, while the remaining two are PCIe 2.0 x1 slots. Those five PCIe 3.0 x16 slots can't be used at the same time. The four orange slots are grouped together, and the single black slot is intended to be used by those who only install a single VGA. The 16 lanes from the CPU are directly connected to the black slot, and the lanes are shifted to the PLX PEX8747 PCIe 3.0 bridge, which then manages the four orange slots, if a device is plugged into the orange slots. The first and third slot provide a PCIe 3.0 x16 link if used alone by dual VGAs, but one of those slots will switch down to dual 3.0 x8 links for additional support once a third or fourth card is installed.


Memory support on the Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 is pretty standard fair for Intel Z77 Epxress products. Four slots each support DIMMs of up to 8 GB in density for a total of 32 GB. There are a total of seven fan headers to help keep all that stuff you might install cool; five are 4-pin PWM headers and two are 3-pin headers.


The case connector support on the bottom edge is actually quite basic. It includes front-panel audio, serial-port headers, and dual USB 2.0 headers on the left; the front panel pin block and USB 3.0 are found on the right. There's an additional USB 3.0 header by the 24-pin power plug.


The rear panel is something I've been waiting to see for some time – a panel completely devoid of USB 2.0. Instead, six USB 3.0 ports are here, as well as dual LAN ports and a 6-port audio stack. Leftover room is taken up by video outputs, as one HDMI, DVI, DisplayPort and VGA are here. A PS/2 Keyboard/mouse combo port rounds things out. The Gigabyte Z77X-UP7 supports no less than ten SATA devices with six ports that are SATA 6 Gb/s, while the remaining four ports are SATA 3 Gb/s.


There's an mSATA port right by the PCH cooler, and I also found a warning nearby stating that using it would disable the SATA 3 Gb/s ports. You can see a picture of that warning label above. That, in case you didn't catch it, means their mSATA port only supports SATA 3Gb/s bandwidth, not 6 Gb/s bandwith, by replacing one of those ports.