Power-draw and overclocking
It's been difficult to differentiate the Z77 and Z68 chipsets thus far. The Gigabyte board has a consistent advantage in the power-draw stakes when idling and running either CPU-intensive wPrime or graphics-based 3DMark Vantage on the IGP and GTX 680.
Overclocking
Using a stock Intel reference heatsink and dialling the voltage to 1.30V in the BIOS, which we consider safe, we managed a stable speed of 4.60GHz on both boards. Able to pass all of our benchmarks, the Gigabyte retuned a CINEBENCH score of 8.89, up from the default 7.08 marks.
Meanwhile, the 3DMark 11 score jumped from 9,177 to 9,415: Nice.
