Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H Z77 Motherboard Preview

Storage wise, we find six SATA ports in total, with four (blue) ports operating at SATAII speeds (3GB/s) while the two (cream/white) ports that are rotated at a right angle allow for faster SATA III (6GB/s) speeds. RAID wise, we find support for RAID 0, 1, 5 and also RAID 10 allowing for quite a lot of functionality considering the lower end nature of this board.

Moving around the board, after we looked at the front panel connectors, situated up by the ATX 24-pin power connector, we find a native USB 3.0 header, which generally on a board in this market segment, you wouldn’t find this type of connector and would be forced to loop any front panel USB 3.0 ports to the rear I/O of your board.

At the top of the board, just behind the rear I/O is where we find a 4-pin ATX power connector, which gives us some kind of insight into the power draw behind the new chipset and possibly even the power envelope when it comes to the new 3rd generation Intel processors, as we’d normally expect an 8-pin connector here.

The rear I/O is very plentiful for a budget board, with four USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 combo mouse and keyboard connector, a variety of display outputs including VGA, DVI and HDMI, 8-channel audio and two USB 3.0 ports. This should be ample for the majority of users and with the inclusion of a native USB 3.0 header, you should be fine for connectivity options that give the very best possible speeds to you.