Thomas Soderstrom just posted an in-depth 7 series comparison article where he compares six high-end Z77 motherboards in an effort to find a real stand out performer. The great news for us is that our GIGABYTE Z77X-UP5 TH board was awarded the highly sought after ‘tom’s hardware recommended’ award.
Thomas was impressed with the ruthless combination of features (dual Thunderbolt anyone?) and wicked value for money with its $240 price tag. You can find more info about the GIGABYTE Z77X-UP5 TH on our website here.
I'm currently planning a new home workstation build, and while I'm not settled on z77 vs x79 yet, I'm leaning towards z77 for thunderbolt, and if I go with the z77 platform this is my motherboard of choice.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I've not been able to find any information about pcie lane assignment/division while using a Xeon-E3 v2 processor (1275 v2 specifically.) The product website lists the that the E3 v2 family of processors are compatible with the motherboard, but as the Xeon series expose 20 lanes of pcie 3.0 connectivity vs the standard 16 lanes of the core i3/5/7 series, what happens with the extra 4 pcie lanes by default?
Given that expanding the Thunderbolt I/O options in the bios disables the Marvel SATA ports, those extra 4-lanes would be extremely nice to have to run a raid card with.
However I will also be running dual GPU's, and I can't find any information to indicate that with an E3v2 the slots run at x8/x8/x4 compared to their normal x8/x4/x4 with a consumer/core i3/5/7 series chip.