Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H (Z87) Motherboard Review

Firstly taking a look at the board, I’m glad to see that Gigabyte have opted for black PCB’s on their complete range of Z87 products, and the UD4H is no different. The red and black contrast is exceptionally pleasing on the eyes and isn’t too over the top as some have said about the Asus ROG range. This particular theme was a big gamble for Gigabyte, with the fear of being accused of copying their competitor or people hating it, but from my own personal point of view, I have to admit that it works and is definitely something that I’d look at using in my own system, if I was looking for a Z87 board from a design perspective.

As we move closer into the board, we can see the Ultra Durable branded red heatsinks around the CPU socket, maintaining the temperatures of the Phases. A few fan headers are situated just under the socket for your CPU cooler, and a single 8-pin ATX power connector is situated at the top of the board.

Further down the board the red theme continues with a low-profile chipset cooler with Gigabyte branding on it.

Moving over to the DIMM slots, we have the usual dual-channel 4 DIMM setup supporting up to 32GB of DDR3 and with XMP support, you shouldn’t have any problems with speed. Also close to the DIMM slots are some handy overclocking features such as power and reset, clear CMOS button, BIOS switches, voltage check points and debug LED. We also have a USB 3.0 header and the ATX 24-pin power connectors.

Moving in closer to the expansion lanes we can see that we have quite a lot going on with three PCI-Express x1 slots, three PCI-Express x16 slots and a single legacy PCI slots. The three PCI-Express x16 lanes run at x16/x8/x4 from top to bottom and 2-way AMD CrossFire or Nvidia SLI is supported using the top two x16 slots, allowing the bandwidth to run at x16/x8 respectively.

Moving across to the SATA ports, we find a total of 8 SATA 6Gb/s connectors, of which 2 are grey (Marvell 88SE9172) and supports RAID 0 and 1, while the other 6 SATA ports are black (Intel Z87 chipset) and support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. Also to the right of the SATA ports is a SATA power connector, which actually provides extra power to the PCI-Express lanes and is recommended when populating two or more of the slots, for instance while using multi GPU technology.

Just down from the SATA ports, we find the normal lineup of headers and connectors, from left to right including front audio, system fan header, TPM connector, COM port, three USB 2.0 ports, another USB 3.0 port and the typical LED/switch header to connect your chassis.

Finishing our look at the board with the rear I/O panel, you can see that we have a PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port, a total of six USB 3.0 ports of which are partly operated by the Intel Z87 chipset as well as the Renesas uPD720210 USB 3.0 hub controller. Display wise we have a VGA connector, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort and for audio we find an otpical SPDIF port and the usual six audio jacks providing 7.1 channel high-definition audio through the Realtek ALC898 codec. There are also two eSATA 6Gb/s (Marvell 88SE9172) connectors and an Intel Gigabit LAN port.