The Board - Layout

There's no doubting that this is a Gigabyte product with just a quick glance. With a matte black PCB and just a slash of blue and silver added in by the coolers, the Z77X-UP5 TH just oozes Gigabyte quality and innovation. The rear of the board is pretty simple, but there are some coolers on there for additional CPU VRM cooling.


The socket area is pretty busy with many large capacitors and quite tall VRM cooling, which might pose an issue for some tower coolers. It's meant for watercooling, so the large coolers don't surprise me one bit. All those capacitors make for many pins on the socket rear, but everything is intelligently laid out to avoid interference with waterblock backplates.


The Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH has a full complement of expansion slots, three of which are PCIe x16 physical with three PCIe x1 slots and a single PCI slot to make seven. The four DIMM slots support DIMMs up to a maximum capacity of 8 GB, bringing total support to 32 GB. Like most Intel Z77 Express products, the outside grey pair should be used first.


The board's bottom edge consists mostly of USB headers with dual USB 3.0 and dual USB 2.0 blocks. There's also a SATA 6 Gb/s port on the bottom edge driven by a Marvell controller. Just to the left of that is a switch which allows you to choose one of two BIOS chips to boot from. There are five total fan headers, all of which are 4-pin PWM, and, in the BIOS, all system fans are linked into a singular option, while the CPU-FAN header gets its own.


The back panel on the Gigabyte Z77X-UP5 TH has all its video outputs, including DVI, VGA and HDMI, up top. There are four USB 3.0, a dual set of USB 2.0, and a single eSATAS 6 GB/s port - driven by the same Marvell controller as the SATA 6 Gb/s port found on the bottom edge. There is a single port of LAN and a 5-port audio block, combined with an optical output, rounding things out. There are, of course, dual Thunderbolt plugs - the main feature that sets this board apart from the rest out there.

There are, other than the SATA ports provided by the Marvell controller, six internal SATA ports, two of which are SATA 6 Gb/s, while the other 4 are SATA 3 Gb/s. Gigabyte also includes an mSATA port up above the PCIe slots, but you lose use of the 4th SATA 3 Gb/s port (SATA port 5) when it is populated.


The PCH cooler is a large flat piece of metal that joins to the other coolers using a heatpipe. Underneath is the Intel Z77 Express PCH itself and not much else. The only other component below the cooler is the Super I/O chip which the cooler does not touch.