And in the Asus corner...

The battle between Asus and Gigabyte has traditionally been a heavyweight contest, though in recent years it's become more or a ritualised beating, as the Asus boards have consistently out-punched Gigabyte at every level. With the release of Intel's Ivy Bridge setup and Z77 platform, however, Gigabyte has made a dramatic return form.

Now the head-to-head is once more a battle of the giants, and nowhere more so than between the two premium Z77 motherboards we're checking out this issue.

They are both around the $400 mark - fortune compared to most of the fairy resonable Z77 boards tested - and come with more ringing and whistly things than you could shake a thin piece of dead tree at. They also both come with connections for the new Intel/Apple love child, Thunderbolt.

Lightning Thunder

Where the Gigabyte board has a pair of connections for the new interface, this Premium effort from the Asus has just a single port on the rear. Still, it shouldn't have trouble rocking triple-screen configurations, with HDMI and fully Displayport connectors alongside that Thunderbolt socket.

The Asus board also seem happier running Thunderbolt, as it managed faster data transfer benchmarks is storage tests. Used a pair of Intel's SSD 330 drives in a RAID O array to make best use of the available bandwidth. In both the maximum read-write and sequential read/write tests, the Asus board posted faster results - but not by much. On the 4K random test though, which is more of an indicaiton of general Windows responsiveness, the Asus board's write speed is 14MB/s higher. That's a big difference in 4K random terms.

Sadly for the Asus board, its usual dominance of gaming benchmarks has been undone by the superior performance of the top-end Gigabyte Z77. It was similar situation with the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H, and show just how much the opposition has caught up.

Usual service is resumed with regards to overlcocking though, as this board gave a solid 4.85GHz clock speed on i7-3770K. That's only a shade quicker than the Gigabyte's 4.79GHz, but still makes a difference.

Another trick the Asus mobo has up its silicon sleeve is the volume of PCIe 3.0 slots. With four full x16 connections, this board will happily rock the four-way SLI world. Sure, it'll get cramped with four GPUs, but you're only going to be covering the power and reset buttons with the fourth card, and with your chassis closed that makes no difference at all.

It comes with a 32GB mSATA SSD too, allowing you to pair up a traditional hard drive with the speedier SSD to give it a boost. The Gigabyte board has the same slot, but doesn't ship with flash memory for the Smart Response lovin'.

It's a tough call between these Asus and Gigabyte boards. The Asus has a little more in the feature set, but the Gigabyte has excellent gaming performance chops. For the money the Asus is probably better value, but it's a close run thing.

Technical analysis

It's a real ding-dong battle between this and the Gigabyte motherboard, and for much of it you'd have to favor the Asus offering with its faster Thunderbolt speeds and higher overclock. The Gigabyte has the edge in gaming performance though, so there isn't clear overall winner

Video encoding performance

4K random Thunderbolt performance

Maximum overclock

Another excellent premium Z77 mobo from the Taiwanese giant

What do you get for the motherboard that has everything? Gigabyte's answer is to add a pair of Thunderbolt connectors to the rear of its massively feature-rich mobo for all the super-speed I/O goodness they bring. This is the top Z77 board form gigabyte, and has pretty much everything a full-spec $418 mobo should.

Thunderbolt connections are the bastard children of PCIe and DisplayPort, enabling fast, two-way streams of both traditional data and video to be piped down the same cable. As an added bones, you can daisy-chain devices to a single connection - like stringing out external hard drives all the way to a DisplayPort monitor.

Gigabyte adding a pair of these new I/O connectors to its board may just seem like willy-waving, but it means the Z77X-UP5TH has an extra two display outputs, as well as all the speedy data-shunting capabilities. This Z77 board then comes with the ability to run three screens without resorting to discrete graphics, and without sacrificing other I/O capabilities thanks to daisy-chaining.

Thunder road

Still, right now the benefits of Thunderbolt are rather ephemeral. There aren't many DisplayPort panels around at the reasonable prices we've come to expect from the recent IPS boom, and unless you're jamming an SSD into an external Thunderbolt caddy, you'll struggle to get full use from the bandwidth the new connection offers.

It's a worthwhile nod to future-proofing though, and this advanced I/O deserves to do well. I remember wondering whether I really needed to go for USB connections on a mobo upgrade in the years before it became a necessity, and being so glad I did.

But although Thunderbolt is a headline-grabber for this mobo, it's not the only thing in its favor. Gigabyte seemed to lose its way a little in the wilderness, but has come out in force for the 7-series boards, offering serious performance once again.

Gigabyte has played about with the power components around the CPU socket, and by changing the MOSFETs, it has made that part of the board cooler. This means it can cope with more juice, and a little more overclocking fun too.

It loses out slightly in the OC race compared with the similarly priced Asus board over the page, but in a bit of a switch around, where Asus used to be the gaming brand, the Gigabyte board offers faster benchmarks in both Shogun 2 and Batman: Arkham City with the same setup.

Obviously though, we have to consider the price tags of these premium boards. When you can pick up a perfectly functional Z77 for almost $322 less, you have to make some pretty compelling arguments to encourage people to spend more. The performance and incredible feature-set of this board though do a pretty good job.

This isn't board for the gamer on a budget - this is for the person putting their PC together with more professional, productive leanings. And who wants to hit the highest gaming frame rates, too.

Technical analysis

It's a close run thing between the premium Gigabyte and Asus boards, with each offering different benefits. The Asus board is a better overclocker and seem to be able to shift things across the Thunderbolt connector more quickly, but the gaming performance of the Gigabyte board is simply incredible.

CPU rendering performance

Gaming performance

Thunderbolt performance