Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H Z77 Motherboard Preview

Further round and looking at the expansion bays, we find three PCIe x1 lanes, one PCIe3.0 x16 lane, one PCIe3.0 x16 which runs at x8 speeds, a single native PCI slot and at the bottom a thrid PCIe3.0 lane which runs at x4 speeds. As we note from the sticker across the top of the slot, this lane is only usable when a 3rd generation CPU is installed into the motherboard.

Along the bottom of the board starting from the left, we have the front panel header, SPDIF, Firewire, TPM, two USB2.0 headers, one of the four system fan headers, front panel connectors, BIOS switch, a SATA III port, and two of the three native USB3.0 headers the last of which is located up next to the 24pin ATX power terminal.

As we highlighted earlier, the chipset heatsink comes in a ‘Gigabyte blue’ colour with their branding to the base. All of the three passively cooled heatsinks are linked together by a single heatpie, which works its way down the board to the chipset heastink.

For SATA, the headers are controlled by two different chipsets. The grey headers to the right of the bank and the additional header we saw down the bottom of the board are run by two Marvell 88SE9172 IC’s and run at SATA 6Gb/s speeds, the same chipset also controls the rear eSATA port. The remainder of the SATA ports are controlled by the Z77 chipset, with the two white ports running at 6Gb/s and the remaining four running at 3Gb/s. As you will note from the sticker, when using the mSATA slot, located below the CPU socket, SATA port 5 will be disabled, giving the user a total of 9 SATA ports available for use at any one time.

Next to the SATA ports we also find a SATA power header, which is used to provide extra power to the PCIe lanes when multi-GPU configurations are installed.

Last of all, we find a slight change to what we have become used to recently on the rear I/O. We have the choice of four display outputs including VGA, DVI, HDMI and a full size DisplayPort. Sound output is provided via 8ch analogue audio and a optical S/PDIF port above the HDMI. On top of this there is dual Gigabit LAN, four USB3.0, two USB2.0, eSATA and Firewire.