ITTechLink: Published On: Thu, May 17th, 2012 Technology | By admin GIGABYTE Z77X-UD3H

Published On: Thu, May 17th, 2012

Technology | By admin

GIGABYTE Z77X-UD3H – Budget builder board extraordinaire

The UD3 has been a long-time favourite of overclockers, gamers and even mainstream consumers in US. It has a large feature list, GIGABYTE’S famous build quality, a three year warranty and, most importantly of all, a fair price. It is very hard to go past the UD3, whether it be the H, R or P variation.
For anyone familiar with the Z68 UD3H, we’ll be perfectly honest: extremely little has changed. But is this a bad thing? Why mess with a winning formula? If the only changes are the addition of PCI-E gen 3, native SATA and USB 3 and support for Lucid Virtu MVP then we’re more than happy. Throw in the fact this board should retail for around $15 less than the Z68 variant and you have yourself a win-win situation.
There are a few people who would like to throw mud at GIGABYTE, and after a viral video a month or two back, people were up in arms about the “poor quality” of the UD3 series. GIGABYTE proved the nay-sayers wrong, by taking a world record on the UD3. That’s right, they beat their own UD7, OC boards, ASUS Rampage and MSI Big Bang with a motherboard that costs – in some cases – less than a third of the price.

GIGABYTE maintains the same level of quality throughout its entire lineup, and it shows with the UD3. GIGABYTE’S done a great job with this motherboard; it features all digital power, Dual UEFI 3D BIOS for performance tuning. Sadly, GIGABYTE doesn’t include pre-set overclocking profiles with the board – in this case it’s being left to the experts – but at least there’s EZ Tune. This is a software kit designed purely for easy overclocking. You can create custom settings and profiles, learning as you go, or simply apply settings GIGABYTE have determined safe and stable for similar systems. On our i7 3770K a 4.2GHz was applied, along with 1600MHz on the RAM.
On the rear of the board we find DVI, VGA, Display Port and HDMI; along with all the other stuff we talked about in the Sniper M3 review. Put simply, it’s pretty much the same as every other Z77 board on the market, with nothing extra flashy increasing the build cost.
Good spacing between the PCI-E ports ensures your video cards will remain nice and cool should you opt for a multi-GPU solution. And if not, there is plenty of space left for other PCI devices. GIGABYTE has included a power button, along with an on-board diagnosis LED. This will help troubleshooting should you encounter hardware problems in your system build, and is not a common find on a board under $200. The addition of the m-SATA slot is also nice.
Overall the UD3H is pretty decent value, though we feel it should be cheaper still. The Z68XP-UD3R costs $149, and the Z77 chipset should cost a little less if we’re not mistaken. This means the current “early adopter” tax could be in place here, and it may be worth waiting for the Z77 prices to fall, or if Z77 features aren’t of interest to you, perhaps just pick up a Z68-UD3 instead.