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 Bios is very cleanly laid out and by default offers a range of settings for inexperienced users, in easy to understand pages.

Gigabyte are attempting to attract users into tweaking the settings, however we always prefer the advanced options, which we use for all the reviews.

When the board was shipped to us, it had the older F12 bios installed, which was two revisions behind the current version. We updated via the Q-Flash tool, which only takes a couple of minutes. The GA-Z77-D3H sets the Core i7 3770k aggressively to a 3.9ghz turbo in all core states, like the ASUS boards we tested previously.

The system defaulted our Corsair 2,400mhz to 1333mhz which is a fairly standard default configuration to ensure a safe post.

The GA-Z77-D3H seems to have most, if not all of the power and phase control settings found on the more expensive Z77X-UD5H.

The BIOS Features panel has settings to configure the boot drive priority, which is one of the first options you need to change if you have multiple hard drives.

The Peripherals panel allows various ports and controllers to be enabled and disabled.

The Power Management panel controls all the sleep and resume settings. The last Save and Exit panel has the usual save and load optimised settings, but it also has an option for multiple profiles, such as when overclocking.

We didn't waste anytime playing with lower clock settings and just cranked the Core i7 3770k to 4.7ghz. This required a voltage of 1.28 for stability. The memory was also solid at 2,400mhz via the built in XMP Profile 1 setting – we had to increase voltage to 1.65V.

Achieving complete stability at the higher overclock settings may require a little tweaking within the Advanced Voltage Settings/3D Power control. We adjusted the PWM Phase Control to eXm performance, with a fast vcore voltage response and the Loadline calibration set to high.

We managed to push the CPU frequency to 4,800mhz, but this required a 3770k voltage setting of 1.35v and we would need more extreme liquid or phase cooling to use this 24/7. We backed down to 4.7ghz again, although we are positive that this motherboard can hit close to 5ghz if you have the right cooling. We were expecting some issues getting stability past 4.6ghz, but were pleasantly surprised.

The GA-Z77-D3H isn't heavily populated with heatsinks so we would recommend a high airflow case, if you plan on overclocking with voltage tweaks.

System validation is available over here.

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