Gigabyte Z77-D3H (Z77) Motherboard Review

Taking a look at the board, we can see that it looks very similar to that of other Gigabyte boards in the value segment of the market. On a personal note, I prefer the look of the higher end black PCB based boards, but for a value board, things are looking quite nice.

Cooling around the board is a bit sparse, but it’s not here to break any overclocking world records and as such includes only a single passive heatsink around the CPU socket, with the rest laid bare. Just behind the heatsink, we find a single 4-pin CPU power connector opposed to an 8-pin that we’d find on higher-end boards.

The only other cooling on the board is covering the Z77 Express chipset and features a blue passive heatsink with Gigabyte branding upon it. This is a low-profile heatsink so that graphics cards aren’t obstructed.

Moving to the top corner, we find four DIMM slots in dual-channel configuration, with contrasting white and light blue colouring. Memory support on this board is up to 32GB of DDR3 of speeds up to 2400MHz when overclocked and has full support for Intel XMP. Also around the memory modules, you’ll find a native USB 3.0 header and the 24-pin ATX power connector

Moving over to the expansion bays, we can see that we have a total of three PCI-Express x1 slots (white), two PCI-Express x16 slots (blue) of which the first runs at x16 speeds while the second runs at x4 speeds and slots PCIEX1_2 and PCIEX1_3 become unavailable when using a second card on the x4 slot. There is also support for AMD CrossFireX when utilising both x16 sized PCI-Express slots and for the older style cards, we find two legacy PCI slots.

Moving further down to the front panel connectors and headers, we find an Audio header port, COM Port header, three USB 2.0 headers, TPM connector and the usual front panel connectors for buttons and LEDs.

Turning towards the storage connectors, we find a total of six SATA ports on this board. Four ports are light blue, indicating that they work from the same controller and support SATA 3Gb/s devices. The two white ports are also controlled by the Z77 chipset, though support the slightly faster SATA 6Gb/s devices. Support for RAID is included with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 functionality across all six SATA ports.

There is also an mSATA connector on the board, situated between the expansion slots and the CPU socket. When in use, one of the SATA II ports will become available, though you will still have access to the other three ports.

Finally, swinging the board around to the rear I/O, we find a total of four USB 2.0 ports, and four USB 3.0 ports, all which run natively from the Intel Z77 Express chipset. Also present is a variety of display connectors with VGA, DVI and HDMI giving you multiple options for display configurations. A PS/2 combo port is also tucked away towards the left for older peripherals. Continuing along the back, we see a single Gigabit LAN port, provided by Atheros, otpical SPDIF and 7.1 channel High-Definition audio provided by the VIA VT2021 codec.