Z77 or X79? want the best of best.

X79, but I wouldn't recommend the UD7. Asus Rampage IV Extreme, MSI Big Bang Xpower II, ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion or X79 Extreme9 are my recommendations. Or, if you can wait, the X79 Extreme11 looks to be a complete beast.

Yea, the x79 is home to the 2011 chips which are more expensive but outperform anything on the 1155 chips that z77 boards offer. That's why 2011 is known as the "enthusiast" level chips.

Ivy bridge (1155 socket for z77) cpus are more than adequate to give you more than enough power for pretty much anything you will do these days. But if you don't give a damn about pricing then you are what they would call a "enthusiast" and the x79 is for you.
Edited by Outlawed - 5/21/12 at 4:35pm

Z77 is a dead end and the 22nm technology on which Ivy Bridge is being made is still not mature enough. X79 has that advantage of using CPUs built with tried and tested 32nm technology, having 6 cores, and 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0, along with a quad channel memory controller and future upgradeability to Ivy Bridge-E by the end of the year, beginning of the next year. This is the platform you want. It's not perfect either. Unlike Z77, there is no native USB 3.0, but all motherboards provide it via an add-on chip. It also features a less than good support on Intel's part when it comes to storage contollers. This is probably because this is using the entreprise level C600 chipset with disabled (by the board vendors) SAS ports and the drivers are a mess.

I had my first BSOD in years because of a previous driver version and even the new one doesn't allow your monitoring programs to access S.M.A.R.T. data for either HDDs or SSD's, and that includes Intel's own SSD toolbox, which doesn't even let you run the optimizer (and I'm not even running the system in RAID). I'm currently using the generic Microsoft's AHCI drivers, which have been working fine for days, but they are slow when it comes to games that need to fetch data from the HDD, and the game stutters at those times. The workaround is to manually force the installation of the regular RST drivers (which won't otherwise install because Intel says the platform is not supported), these seem to work well, but you're on your own. Meanwhile Intel doesn't say a thing on when this will be fixed.
Edited by tpi2007 - 5/21/12 at 4:36pm

I actually find MSI to have the best UEFI by far. The only thing the board is lacking is an offset voltage parameter.

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I personally would not buy any top-level x79 board without 8 RAM slots, hence the recommendations I made.

The MSI Big Bang Xpower II is also the only XL-ATX x79 board with 8 RAM slots you can get at the moment, which allows it to have much more room for expansion. I've heard only good things about its OC capabilities, and the bios really is more of a minor annoyance than a major letdown.