Gigabyte Z87-D3HP (LGA 1150) Motherboard Review

Feature Overview

 Ultra Durable 5

At the heart of the Gigabyte focus for the Z87-D3HP motherboard is the Ultra Durable 5 Plus component set which includes four main aspects:

• Ultra Cool – Gigabyte’s new heatsink design
• Ultra Performance – Gigabyte’s use of improved ICs and PWM controllers from International Rectifier
• Ultra Safe – Gigabyte’s DualBIOS ensures failed or virus attacked BIOS’s can easily be recovered by the secondary BIOS
• Ultra USB 3+ – Gigabyte add extra USB 3.0 ports to the two included with the Intel Z87 chipset. They use 2 Renesas uPD720210 USB 3.0 controllers to provide you with four more USB 3.0 ports at the rear and two USB 3.0 headers on the board.

UEFI DualBIOS

The UEFI DualBIOS is a big selling point for Gigabyte and it means that your PC is safeguarded from malfunctions and BIOS attacks. There’s also a pretty extensive thought process that’s gone into that UEFI BIOS, which we covered more on the previous page. The BIOS offers you two different layouts and different resolutions to support  your needs.

One Fuse Per USB Port

Should you be unlucky enough to break one of your USB port fuses you’ll be pleased to know Gigabyte deploy individual fuses for each port meaning the failure of one does not result in the non-usability of all ports on that same power line.

Gigabyte App Center and EasyTune

We won’t delve too much into the software as we have that to cover on the next page, but like a lot of motherboard vendors Gigabyte are pushing their software package that includes monitoring and diagnostic tools, update tools and overclocking tools.