In part one of our review of the Gigabyte Z87-UD3H we looked at the design, features and layout of the board. Now in part two we are going to see if those choices were good or bad. Gigabyte has a fairly good history of designing boards that have great performance, but as have also seen boards that fall apart as soon as you push them (overclocking). So far it looks like the Z87X-UD3H has the right components and design to maintain performance for both stock use and also for overclocking. Let’s put that theory to the test shall we?
Value -Value is another very subjective topic. What is expensive to some might be a deal to others. You can look at this topic in multiple ways. One is raw price and the other is what you get for the money. Each is accurate and both are correct ways to look at price/value. We tend to look at features, performance and real-property when we discuss value. However, we also take into account the raw cash cost of the item. According to Newegg and many other online retailers the Z87X-UD3H will only set you back about $160. To be honest this is a pretty amazing price considering the performance that we are seeing from it. There are not many Z87X-UD3H boards in the $160 price range that are hitting this level of performance and, of course, that can overclock as well as we are seeing here.
Conclusion -Going into our review of the Z87X-UD3H we had some concerns about performance and especially overclocking. Lately we have not been all that impressed with Intel based motherboards simply because they are almost all just copies of each other with a slightly different feature set. We saw quite a bit of this with the Z77 chipset and expected the same with the Z87. However, the Z87X-UD3H did much better than we expected. We saw solid performance in ever test that we ran including gaming. On top of excellent stock performance we found that the Z87X-UD3H is capable of some serious overclocking. As we mentioned above we were able to push our Core i7 4770K to 5GHz. This is a clock we have never been able to hit before with our 4770K CPU. Gigabyte has packaged all of this will a very acceptable price ($160). When you put all of this together it you get a board that is certainly worthy of our Gold Key award.
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