Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard Review

Z77X-UD4H Overview
The Z77X-UD4H is an ATX motherboard and keeps the same styling we have seen on most of their Z77 lineup.  You have a black PCB with black, grey and blue accents.  The black PCB is a very solid black, I have seen other boards that claim to have a black PCB and it is very faint.  This one is spot on.

Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard

Starting at the center of the board you have your CPU socket.  Around the socket are your power delivery components, which are covered by two large heatsinks.  Gigabyte is using ferrite-core coils and solid electrolytic capacitors.  This board features an 8+2+1 power phase design.  This is 8 phases for the CPU, 2 for the CPU VSA and 1 for the embedded GPU.  This of course is an all digital design.  On the top of the board you have your 8pin CPU power connection and a 4pin CPU fan connector.

Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard

Moving over to the memory slots you have 4 DIMM slots which are color-coded.  These support 32GB of dual channel DDR3 memory up to 2800MHz.  At the top corner of the board you have three buttons.  A very large power button, reset button and clear CMOS button.  It is great to see these buttons on the board, it makes things so much easier when you are working with the board outside of a case.  Moving down you have a 4pin fan connector and voltage monitoring points.  Of course you have a 24pin ATX power connection and a USB 3.0 header.  There are a total of 8 SATA ports.  The two white ports are SATA 6GB/s ports and the four black ports are SATA 3GB/s ports.  All six of these ports are controlled by the Z77 chipset and support RAID 0,1, 5 and 10 modes.  You will also notice a SATA power connection to give extra power to your PCIe ports if needed.

Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard

Along the bottom of the board are all of your connections, headers and everything else.  Going from right to left you have a 4pin fan connector, front panel connections, BIOS switch, another 4pin fan connector, three USB 2.0 headers, TPM header, another 4pin fan connector, and your audio header.  That gives you a total of 5 fan connectors, which is great, but Gigabyte never positions one by where your exhaust fan will be on your case.  You will also notice a large heatsink that covers the PCH.

Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard

As far as expansion slots go you have two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, three PCIe 2.0 x1 slots and a single legacy PCI slot.  Moving to the connections on the back of the board you have a PS/2 port, six USB 3.0 ports, VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, optical audio, two eSATA ports, Gigabit ethernet, and your audio ports.

Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H Motherboard

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