Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H Overview
Taking a closer look at the motherboard we can see that Gigabyte has gone with a matte black for the PCB. The really got the matte color right on this board. There are grey accents on other parts of the board and the three heatsinks on the board are silver with blue accents. Overall it is a pretty good looking board.
Starting at the CPU socket you can see it is pretty open so you shouldn’t have any issue installing your aftermarket CPU on there. The Z87X-UD3H features an 8+2 power phase design. So you have 8 phases for the CPU and two for the memory. Covering the power delivery components are two heatsinks, they are standalone heatsinks and are not connected by a heatpipe. The 8pin CPU power connection is located at the top left of the board. On the opposite side of the top heatsink you have 4pin CPU fan connector and a 3pin CPU optional fan connector.
Moving over to the memory slots you have four slots that can support up to 32GB of DDR3 memory ranging from speeds of DDR3-1333 all the way up to DDR3-3000 (O.C.). The slots are color coded so you know where to install your memory for dual-channel operation. Moving over there are two small switches. One is the clear CMOS button and the other is the system reset button. I’m not really sure if I like how close these buttons are to each other. There is also a large power button. You will find two small switches, one is for the dual BIOS function the other is to disable the clear CMOS button. Moving along you have voltage check points, debug LED display, 24pin ATX power connection, 3pin fan connector and a internal USB 3.0 header.
Moving down to your storage connections they are set at a 90 degree angle as most we see are these days. The first six SATA ports are SATA 6GB/s ports and are powered by the Z87 chipset. The last two ports are also SATA 6GB/s ports and are powered by the Marvell 88SE9172 chip. There is also a SATA power connector right above the SATA connectors, this is to give more power to your PCI-Express slots if needed. At the bottom of the board you will find the rest of your onboard connectors, these include two fan connections, a second USB 3.0 header, three USB 3.0 headers, front panel headers, COM header, TPM header, and front panel audio headers.
As far as expansion slots go you have two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot, three PCI-Express x1 slots and a legacy PCI slot. The two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots will operate at 16×0 or 8×8 depending on how many cards you have installed. The bottom PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slot is mechanical x4 so if you were to go with a 3-card setup it would run at 8x8x4, which is not that ideal. Gigabyte has place a 4pin fan connector above the PCI-Express slots, which is a nice addition as their Z77 boards were missing this.
Finally onto the I/O ports you have a PS/2 port, six USB 3.0 ports, DVI, VGA, optical, HDMI, DisplayPort, two eSATA, Gigabit Ethernet and audio.
