Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH Review: Thunderbolt Times Two

3D Movement Algorithm Test

The algorithms in 3DPM employ both uniform random number generation or normal distribution random number generation, and vary in various amounts of trigonometric operations, conditional statements, generation and rejection, fused operations, etc.  The benchmark runs through six algorithms for a specified number of particles and steps, and calculates the speed of each algorithm, then sums them all for a final score.  This is an example of a real world situation that a computational scientist may find themselves in, rather than a pure synthetic benchmark.  The benchmark is also parallel between particles simulated, and we test the single thread performance as well as the multi-threaded performance.

Despite the fact that single threaded performance should not be affected by Multicore Enhancement, the Gigabyte and ASUS boards do seem to have a small advantage here by less than 1%.  As the G1.Sniper 3 has MCE-Plus, it still comes top.

For our 3DPM-MT test, cores and MHz rain supreme and it is the boards with MCE or MCE-Plus that gets top marks.  As such, the UP4 TH falls in the MCE range on 702.46 million movements per second.

WinRAR x64 3.93 - link

With 64-bit WinRAR, we compress the set of files used in the USB speed tests. WinRAR x64 3.93 attempts to use multithreading when possible, and provides as a good test for when a system has variable threaded load.  If a system has multiple speeds to invoke at different loading, the switching between those speeds will determine how well the system will do.

Similar to 3DPM-MT, cores and MHz rain supreme in our WinRAR testing, although the ability for motherboards to implement the fast speed is also a factor.  The Z77X-UP4 TH falls short of the fastest Z77 board by 10 seconds, but still ends up better than the average time.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.2 - link

FastStone Image Viewer is a free piece of software I have been using for quite a few years now.  It allows quick viewing of flat images, as well as resizing, changing color depth, adding simple text or simple filters.  It also has a bulk image conversion tool, which we use here.  The software currently operates only in single-thread mode, which should change in later versions of the software.  For this test, we convert a series of 170 files, of various resolutions, dimensions and types (of a total size of 163MB), all to the .gif format of 640x480 dimensions.

At a time of 52 seconds, the Z77X-UP4 TH comes near the middle of the pack.  Nothing seems to be able to catch the ASUS Deluxe and Premium in this test.

Xilisoft Video Converter

With XVC, users can convert any type of normal video to any compatible format for smartphones, tablets and other devices.  By default, it uses all available threads on the system, and in the presence of appropriate graphics cards, can utilize CUDA for NVIDIA GPUs as well as AMD APP for AMD GPUs.  For this test, we use a set of 32 HD videos, each lasting 30 seconds, and convert them from 1080p to an iPod H.264 video format using just the CPU.  The time taken to convert these videos gives us our result.

Video conversion is a classic test of cores and MHz, so as a result the UP4 TH performs well with 68 seconds, one second off our top spot held by five boards.

x264 HD Benchmark

The x264 HD Benchmark uses a common HD encoding tool to process an HD MPEG2 source at 1280x720 at 3963 Kbps.  This test represents a standardized result which can be compared across other reviews, and is dependant on both CPU power and memory speed.  The benchmark performs a 2-pass encode, and the results shown are the average of each pass performed four times.