Gigabyte is not a company to be left out of any market and they are certainly keeping pace in the motherboard arena. They are one of the companies that not only leads sales, but also helps to drive innovation and performance standards. We have had many Gigabyte motherboards in the lab and almost without exception they have been great performers. Gigabyte has also been able to learn from their mistakes and from feedback, whether it is from consumers or the press. So where does this leave Gigabyte in the Z87 market? Well we happen to have a Z87X-UD3H in the lab, so let’s take a look and see.
Features -In the current market motherboard (and indeed almost all component) performance is very close. The days of a large performance advantage between boards using the same chipset are long gone. That is unless someone makes a HUGE mistake (like runs traces completely wrong). Now, the thing that differentiates different products is the features. These are things like power management, extra slots, better audio CODECs etc. It is these items that R&D teams work so hard to drop into what are really identical pieces of hardware at their most basic level. There is a fine balance between having a good feature set and overkill and depending on the market you are selling to this line actually moves quite a bit. With the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H it looks like it is much more of an overclocker or enthusiast board. This means that many common features might not be well accepted so with that in mind let’s take a look some of the features found on the Z87X-UD3H
Excellent – Dual BIOS with manual selectVoltage Monitor PointsIntel LAN
Hmmm it looks like Gigabyte is trying to play catch up with Asus and is dropping Intel LAN controllers on to their boards. This is a nice addition and brings the networking performance up a notch.
In the middle (sort of good) -SLIPCIe Gen 3.0Gigabyte On/Off Charge Gold Plated CPU Socket
These features are nice although a couple are probably much more gimmicky. The gold socket might get you a little better connectivity, but not really enough to make it a great option.
Floor Mats -8-Channel AudioUSB 3.0On-board buttons
Not much to say about these items. They are not really features anymore, but an expected part of any motherboard.
Conclusion – So far things are looking good for the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H. It has a clean layout and some very obviously changes components. Right now from the looks of the board we are guessing that Gigabyte intends this board to be used by enthusiasts looking for the best bang for their buck. You can get SLI out of the Z87-UD3H, but you are not wasting money or traces on extra PCI lanes so you should still be able to get dual GPU performance without stability issues that many multi-gpu setups have. As always we will reserve our judgment until we have the chance to put the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H through the lab. Be sure to check back soon for part two of this review.
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