GIGABYTE Launches the Z87X-SLI, A Low-Cost Gamer Oriented Motherboard

GIGABYTE has announced a new motherboard supporting the LGA1150 socket for Haswell CPUs, the Z87X-SLI. What makes this motherboard different from all the other gaming-oriented motherboards is that GIGABYTE is targeting gamers who just want to play games and not overclock their gear. The Z87X-SLI comes with all the basic necessities with the addition of SLI support, stripping all the extras and making the motherboard more affordable than the rest.

GIGABYTE has only equipped the Z87X-SLI with six SATA III ports, six USB 3.0 ports along with HDMI (with support of 4K resolution @ 24 Hz), DVI and VGA for display output. To keep the cost down, GIGABYTE has attached the Realtek ALC892 audio codec and Realtek gigabit Ethernet LAN. In terms of expansion slots, it comes with one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, one PCIe 3.0 x8 slot, three PCIe x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots. In case of SLI, both the PCIe slots will shift to x8/x8 mode.

Looking at the Haswell LGA1150 socket, we see that GIGABYTE has gold-plated it to add better conductibility between the motherboard and CPU (and it also looks good either way). In terms of RAM, the Z87X-SLI provides 4 sockets and a 32 GB of maximum DDR3 RAM support with speeds of up to 3000 MHz O.C. GIGABYTE included a Hardware Monitoring feature as well, having support for System voltage detection, CPU/System temperature detection, fan speed detection, overheating warning, fan fail warning and fan speed control.

The GIGABYTE Z87X-SLI will soon be available in stores for £95 (inc VAT) or $130 in US. Though GIGABYTE is targeting the mid-low budget market, there are quite a lot of motherboards in this price range which are equivalent or more performance-oriented than the Z87X-SLI.

Thank you Chip Loco and GIGABYTE for providing us with this information
Images courtesy of GIGABYTE