Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H (Z87) Motherboard Review
Andy Ruffell / 12 years ago
The board is a fine example of how Gigabyte have changed things up with a full ATX form factor black PCB and subtle blue and grey colouring. The majority of the components on the board are black to match in and the design is quite spacious giving room to breath around the components with nothing over the top.
The CPU socket area includes an Ultra Durable branded heatsink assisting the MOSFETS and other vital components. A single 8-pin ATX power connector provides the relevant juice to the socket with durable black solid caps floating nearby. Under the extreme cooling solution as Gigabyte so adequately put it , is the fully digital PWMs. There is plenty of room around the socket and two handy CPU fan headers nearby for your CPU cooler.
The other heatsink on the board is covering the Z87 Intel chipset and makes up the Ultra Durable 5 Plus range with Ultra Cool technology which consists of a new heatsink design allowing the PCH to remain cool, even when overclocked.
Four DIMM slots as per usual in a dual-channel operation supporting up to 32GB of DDR3 memory speeds of up to 2400MHz +. Closeby we find a USB 3.0 connector, ATX 24-pin power connector, system fan header, debug LED, overclocking functionality buttons including power, reset, reset CMOS and BIOS switches. Also you’ll see a set of voltage points for those wanting to measure accurately.
Moving over to the expansion slots, we find three PCI-Express x1 slots, a legacy PCI slot and three PCI-Express x16 physical slots. The first two x16 lanes are PCI-Express 3.0 compliant and run from the CPU in x8/x8 configuration, whereas the third x16 slot only runs at x4 speeds, meaning that for 3-way CrossFire only the slots will run at x8/x8/x4. It is worth noting that only 2-way SLI is supported on this board.
Moving around to the SATA ports, we find a total of 8, of which 6 are black (Intel Z87) and two are grey (Marvell 88SE9230) and all run at SATA 6Gb/s speeds. Also nearby we find a SATA power connector for providing extra volts to the expansion lanes when utilising 3-way CrossFireX technology with your graphics cards.
Further down the board are the front panel connectors and headers, which from left to right we find a front panel audio header and SPDIF out, system fan header, TPM connector, COM port, two USB 2.0 ports, a second USB 3.0 header and front panel headers for chassis switches and LEDs.
Lastly, we find ourselves moving to the rear of the board and taking a look at the rear I/O panel. From left to right we find a PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port, two USB 3.0 ports, VGA, DVI, DisplayPort and HDMI display outputs, and optical SPDIF. There are another two USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA 6Gb/s connectors, another two USB 3.0 ports, Intel Gigabit LAN and 6 audio jacks running through the Realtek ALC898 codec.
