Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard – packs a punch at £80

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard3. Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard (Super High Res Gallery)4. Bios and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201112. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit13. Synthetic: SSD Performance14. Real World: 3D Rendering15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: HandBrake 9.517. Gaming: F1 201118. Gaming: Alien V Predator19. Gaming: Dirt Showdown20. Gaming: Max Payne 321. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

The Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard ships in a plain, yet attractive white box with the product name in the middle, alongside a visual representation of the 3D Bios. ‘3D' is the primary focus for Gigabyte.

Our bundle didn't look like a fresh new sample from the retail channel, as it had a single black SATA cable laying loose on the board itself above. Underneath was a manual, reference/guidebook, software disc, two other Sata cables, a Gigabyte sticker and a backplate.

The Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H isn't going to win any awards for appearance, built around a bright blue PCB with a single, small heatsink positioned around the CPU socket for VRM cooling. It is ATX sized, measuring 305mm x 244 mm.

The Gigabyte Z77X-US5H motherboard has several, very large heatsinks cooling all the VRM's, however due to the lower price, the GA77 D3H has to cut a few corners. Hopefully it won't affect the overclocking performance too badly. We look at this later in the review.

This board has only a 4 pin CPU power connector, unlike the 8 pin version found on the Gigabyte Z77X-US5H. Thankfully, there are two 4 pin fan headers here for dual fan CPU coolers.

There are four memory slots, dual channel, coloured blue and white. It can support up to 32GB of non ECC DDR3 memory. The listed speeds are 2400 (OC), 1600/1333/1066.

The GA-Z77-D3H has six SATA connectors. The light blue coloured ports mounted vertically to the board are all SATA 3 GB/s rated and are controlled by the Intel Z77 chipset. The two white ports mounted horizontally to the board are SATA 6 GB/s rated and are also controlled by the Intel Z77 chipset. The Intel Z77 chipset supports Raid 0, Raid 1, Raid 5 and Raid 10 configurations.

The motherboard is passively cooled.

The GA-Z77-D3H has a single slot for an mSATA Solid State Drive, which is controlled by the Z77 chipset. This is SATA 3GB/s rated. If a drive is connected here then the SATA 2 5 connector will be unavailable.

The top PCI Express x16 slot runs at x16 times when used in single mode. The second PCI Express x16 slot operates at x4. It shares bandwidth with the PCIEX1_2/3 slots. There are also 3 PCI Express x1 slots and 2 PCI slots.

Back Panel connectors include:

1. 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
2. 1 x D-Sub port
3. 1 x DVI-D port
4. 1 x HDMI port
5. 4 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports
6. 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
7. 1 x RJ-45 port
8. 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
9. 5 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out, Rear Speaker Out, Side Speaker Out, Line In/Mic In, Line Out)

Along the bottom of the PCB is an Audio connector, another 4 pin fan header and 3 USB headers. The front panel panel is at the far right.

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