Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H Motherboard

Conclusions

The Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H is clearly targeted to the user who wants an above-the-average motherboard based on the new Z87 chipset for the new “Haswell” CPUs (fourth-generation Core i3, Core i5 or Core i7 processors).

The highlights of this motherboard include the presence of 10 USB 3.0 ports, six SATA-600 ports, two additional SATA-600/eSATA ports, a decent voltage regulator circuit, a POST diagnostics display, two BIOS chips, voltage monitoring points, a high-end audio codec, independent analog audio jacks, audio amplifier for analog headphones, and more.

There are, however, a couple of drawbacks with this motherboard, but they shouldn’t affect most users.

The first drawback is with the PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot, which works at x4. This slot shares PCI Express lanes with slots “PCIEX1_2” and “PCIEX1_3” slots, and they can’t be used at the same time. Also, you can’t use it with SLI and CrossFireX configurations, rendering it pretty much useless.

The second drawback we see with this motherboard is the way the USB 3.0 ports are configured. The Z87 chipset supports six USB 3.0 ports, but only four of them are used. Two of them are expanded to eight through the use of two USB 3.0 hub chips. If you use two or more ports that are actually connected to the same USB 3.0 port on the chipset at the same time, the performance will drop. Unfortunately the manufacturer doesn’t label which ports are shared.