The 8th April 2012 saw the new Intel Z77 chipset being released with the upcoming Ivy Bridge 3rd generation processors coming later in the month. With this in mind, we started to unravel the boards in terms of style, design and features just ahead of the 8th April, to give our loyal readers a first hand look at what was going to be on offer. You can find this here and get a first glance at the board and exactly what features it incorporates.

Shortly after this, we were allowed to start testing the boards using our trusty i7 2700k Sandy Bridge processor, so that we can show you how things performed, and if the Z77 chipset itself gave anything extra to the performance of an already fantastic range of processors. You can find our Sandy Bridge review here, where you can see exactly how the Z77 chipset allowed our i7 2700k to perform, but this is only half of what we were waiting for, as the true test would be when we could show you how Ivy Bridge performed.

As we’ve already looked at the board in detail in our preview, and shown off the BIOS in our Sandy Bridge review, there is no need to cover old ground that we’ve already shown. Instead, we were keen to show you exactly how the new Ivy Bridge i7 3770k would perform, and also to show you a comparison against how it overclocks and how it compares against the i7 2700k that we looked at last time.

With that in mind, let’s get straight into it and show you our test system and how the chip overclocked on the Z77X-UD5H motherboard from Gigabyte before we look at some real benchmarks from our list of tried and tested benchmarking applications.