Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H reliability/quality

[8bitgamer757]

So i was just wondering if anyone knows how reliable or how high/low quality this motherboard is, and hopefully its value as if its good enough i might move one to ryzen possibly (doubtful) i just want to know if i have a good motherboard. thanks

 

[bobbybluz]

It's a 7 1/2 year old mobo. Did it lead an easy or hard life in that time? Z77 was/is a decent Intel chipset for the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPU's. Here's a review from when it was new: https://www.anandtech.com/show/6108...eview-functionality-meets-competitive-pricing

 

[rtwjunkie]

So i was just wondering if anyone knows how reliable or how high/low quality this motherboard is, and hopefully its value as if its good enough i might move one to ryzen possibly (doubtful) i just want to know if i have a good motherboard. thanks

Are you saying you want to use it for a Ryzen if it’s good enough, or did I misunderstand you? If so, it will not work because it’s an older intel board that won’t take AMD chips.

Other than that, those Ultra durable Gigabyte boards were actually pretty reliable for a number of years.

 

[tabascosauz]

So i was just wondering if anyone knows how reliable or how high/low quality this motherboard is, and hopefully its value as if its good enough i might move one to ryzen possibly (doubtful) i just want to know if i have a good motherboard. thanks

I can see that you already have the board, so I'll skip the obvious.

The UD5H is a pretty decent board. Sin was kinda the OG when it came to Intel boards up to Haswell, before he stopped putting out content, so here's a rundown of the board and associated board features:

This was 2012 and a mid-range board, so you won't find PowIRs, but the delivery setup isn't bad. The two MOSFET heatsinks are very well finned and connected between them and the PCH by means of a heatpipe (god, I miss the actual heatsinks of old, not the edgy, blingy garbage of today with 0 additional surface area). Some nice board buttons for OCing too. If your specs are correct and you are running a regular i5-3570 @ 4GHz by making use of the partially unlocked multiplier, you shouldn't be have any problems.

Again, this is Ivy Bridge, so you have Marvell and VIA third-party controllers to supplement the sparse USB 3.0 and SATA3 available from the Panther Point PCH; not all your ports are native. What I find most interesting is the SATA power connector available to the PCIe slots.

While they've been pretty stellar over the years with physical quality, Gigabyte's never been much good at designing BIOSes compared to the competition, and their 3D BIOS of that era (I have an essentially identical version on my H97N-WIFI) sucks pretty bad, particularly when it comes to finding settings and fan control options. But it's usable. And you get DualBIOS, a relative staple of Gigabyte boards from Sandy to Haswell, something us AMDers still don't get in 2019.

It is a good board, but when it comes to high-mileage hardware like this one, no one can really tell you when they'll give up the ghost. It can be gradual, or you might wake up one day and the board just doesn't have it in it anymore. Personally, I've had to deal with a roughly 6-year-old-at-the-time Asus P7P55D Pro (IIRC, a lot of the Ibex Peak-era Asus boards looked similar) when it was nearing the end of its lifespan and threw increasing numbers of BSODs regardless of what I did. It housed a i5-650 and i5-760 for most of its life and did office work. On the other hand, there is one sole remaining system in that office running the same board, P7P55D Pro, with a i5-760, that still works pretty well; there are lots of retired Conroes from there, but also a single Pentium (E2160?) still going. I have a ~7-year-old system with a i7-3770 and OEM Dell H77 board, and a ~6.5-year-old system with a E3-1230v2 on a Z77 Extreme3, and both are chugging along on the daily. Three separate 5-year-old Haswell platforms with a i3-4160, i5-4460 and i7-4790K still work just fine.

 

[jaggerwild]

The Z77-Z87 boards have an error where they will hang on power up, all you need to do is power it on(it will just sit there, not posting)hit the reset button and boom it will boot.

 

[Vario]

I had the Z77X-UD3H and had a negative opinion of it. I experienced frequent BSODs, the board had ram compatibility issues, and the overclocking wasn't as good as the two Asus P8Z77-V I built for friends. The UD3H board materials seemed high quality, thick PCB, but I think their bios are junk.

I also had an Asrock Z77E-ITX and it was quite good. I switched to AsRock for subsequent builds.

 

[verycharbroiled]

im still rolling on my gigabyte z77x ud5h and 3570k since they came out as the daily driver. aside from one pcie slot giving problems (and that probably being my fault) its been very reliable, being on mostly 24/7/365. a bluesceen once a year maybe (win7).

doesnt seem picky on ram either, ive run oddball ram configurations in it in the past.

 

[Assimilator]

I used this board as my daily driver up until the middle of this year. Issues I had with it:

* As @jaggerwild noted the booting is funky, although this is a Z77 thing. However I had much worse experience with this board booting and its dual BIOS feature: I would put the system into Sleep, then it would fail to resume (system would power on but just sit there on the "CPU initialisation" POST code). The only solution to this would be to hard power off the system, let it wait a few minutes, then power it back on, at which point it would somehow detect that the current BIOS was "bad" and switch over to the other BIOS, then boot properly (from the hibernate file). So essentially on one day it would boot from the primary BIOS, the next day it would fail to boot then switch itself to the secondary BIOS, next day switch back to the primary BIOS... This issue was never solved by BIOS updates during the lifetime of the board, and beleive me I tried every BIOS available, even the betas from TweakTown.
* Intel USB3 ports don't work during boot (Z77 limitation).
* VIA USB3 hubs/ports are extremely flaky. Sometimes a connected device just isn't detected at all, sometimes Windows detect it but reports "USB device not recognized" and the device can't be used, sometimes Windows reports "USB device has drawn too much power" and the device can't be used. Sometimes the last 2 messages are reported even when devices aren't connected to those hubs' ports.

On the upside, overclocking was very easy and very stable, all I had to do was select the desired multiplier and the voltage offset and off the board would go. (It was possible to leave the voltage on auto to allow the board to figure it out, but as is normal that would result in ridiculously high volts and thus unnecessary heat, hence I always dialled the volts in myself.) The only time I had stability issues with the OC was when I didn't allocate enough volts and got BSODs, but again that is a standard overclocking thing. I got up to 4.7GHz stable with a 3570K although heat was the limiting factor; 4.6GHz was my daily driver on that chip and the 3770K I subsequently replaced it with, and that was completely stable.

 

[8bitgamer757]

i personally have not had those boot/usb problems you guys are talking about, and i have had this cpu/mobo combo for over a year now, but maybe i just won the silicon lottery or something, i have no clue

 

[freeagent]

I'm not really a Gigabyte guy myself, I did own a UD7 once.. X58.. anyways, the quality of the board was fantastic, looked and felt the part, but the bios was a letdown, as was power delivery. I cant say if that's the case for z77, but I did see a screen cap on another forum of a guy with a giga board and i5 3rd gen, and it showed his set and actual vcore, which is what I saw with my x58. Booo.