Gigabyte Z77-D3H (Z77) Motherboard Review

With Gigabyte calling us and asking if we wanted to take a look at this board, our simple reply was asking what this board is about, and who it’s aimed at. Their response was that it’s the successor of the Z68AP-D3 that we looked at some time ago. For a little refresh, we invite you to check it out here as it was an amazing board that earned our Editor’s Choice Award, so as you can appreciate, we had high hopes for the refreshed Z77 version that was coming our way.

Lets start by talking a bit more about the performance, as this board gave some really strong numbers across a variety of different tests. Sometimes, we even saw this beating the extreme boards, not only from other brands, but from Gigabyte too, including the G1.Sniper M3. Though those particular boards do offer other features, aimed at the extreme market, that the D3H simply can’t offer, for its particular price point.

Speaking of price, at a very attractive £80/$120, you’ll be hard pushed to find any other board, from Gigabyte or their competitors that can offer the same performance and features and still give an amazing bang for buck as this has.

Feature wise, we see a good amount of expansion slots, sufficient cooling and overclockability that can be pushed quite far, though if you have a bad clocker like us, you can’t really blame the board too much. Somehow, Gigabyte manage to squeeze all of these features and benefits into a board that is one of the most competitively priced we’ve ever seen. With the overclock we saw, we know from experience with other boards, that we really are pushing it quite far, and you may be lucky to get an extra 100MHz out of a similar board, but so many different aspects go into that such as Phase, BIOS and much more.

We can’t help but feel that this is going to be one of the more successful boards on the market, and can honestly see system integrators using it for pre-built systems as it offers great potential for a variety of uses. This is also down to the features, the overclockability, the branding and of course the price and with those four things, we can see this flying off the shelves.

Of course, we would have preferred to seen a bit more style go into the board, but at the end of the day; it is a budget board and keeping costs down to a minimum was one of the key points when development went ahead, so we can’t really penalise them on that. With that in mind, we can honestly say that we’ve seen a lot uglier boards in our time.

One of the nicest features this board has is most likely the BIOS, as it’s good to see some extreme features, like the 3D and Advanced BIOS on a low-end board, as it gives a more upmarket feel and helps with the Gigabyte branding as a whole.

Due to this board not having any flaws, and offering great performance at stock and overclocked speeds, we can’t find a reason not to give it the Editor’s Choice Award and have to congratulate Gigabyte on this board. As we said before, this is the sucessor to the Z68AP-D3 and it’s not very often that a sequel is as good as the first.