A Closer Look
Gigabyte’s Z87-D3HP uses a nice all black PCB & connector design with the same blue accenting seen on the Z87X-UD3H. The layout is very clean and spacious particularly around the CPU socket area which is great news for CPU cooler compatibility.
The CPU power delivery cooling is dealt with by a modestly sized blue heatsink.
At the top is an 8 pin EPS as well as two CPU fan connectors.
Four DIMMs provide room for up to 32GB of RAM. There are also two USB 3.0 headers at this part of the board.
The Z87 PCH cooling is dealt with by another blue Gigabyte heatsink.
In terms of PCI connectivity the first is 16X PCIe 3.0, the second and third are PCIe 2.0 X1, the fourth is PCIe 16X 2.0 (4X electrical) and the last two are PCI.
You can see all six SATA connectors are top facing which may not be to everyone’s taste, though the top facing ports align with the PCI slots so you shouldn’t have any blockages from PCI cards.
Connectors at the bottom of the board include front panel audio, a serial/COM port, a TPM header, two front panel USB 2.0, front panel buttons and a system fan header.
The audio implementation is neatly arranged near the audio ports. There’s no advanced PCB separation but the audio should still be good.
The rear I/O (from left to right) includes 2 USB 2.0, 1 PS/2 mouse combo port, VGA, DVI, two USB 3.0, HDMI, four USB 3.0, Intel Gigabit, and six audio jacks which includes optical S/PDIF.
The bottom of the board has the screws for the heatsinks if you wish to remove them for any reason.
I’ve really come to like Gigabyte mobo’s over the past couple of years and their UEFI BIOS software suite has improved dramatically to what I remember and although I don’t think it’s quite as polished as Asus’s, it’s not far off. My test bench & personal rig both currently use Gigabyte mobo’s.
“would of” should be “would have” in a few places. Good information though!
thanks. my Achilles heel. Always make that mistake X_X