GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD5H LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

Pros: - MB is heavy, full ATX size… doesn’t flex much when installed in case - BIOS is gorgeous on home theater TV… I actually said “wow” out loud - QUICK BOOT!... (new install), but it is CRAZY quick to boot / restart - Cushioned rear IO panel… a nice touch! - (6) SATA cables provided… lots of other nifty items include Front Panel USB 3.0 panel, (1) nVidia SLI connector, GIGABYTE case sticker - Everything on the board is labeled (more or less)... I like that. - Headers aren’t just vertical pins on the board… they have plastic surrounding the pins - Driver CD included installed all devices / chipsets correctly… just avoid hitting “install all” or you might end up with some bundled garbage you don’t want - Smart Fan control in EZ-Setup launched from AppCenter is a must-use feature - Plenty of fan headers… 5 system fan, 1 cpu water cooler, 1 cpu fan - DVI port, instead of VGA… very risque - Windows 7 installed without a hitch! YAY! Not sure if I just got lucky or what... but I've had zero issues running Windows 7 Pro x64 on this board. All-in-all my system build with this board at the foundation has been nothing but stable and reliable.

Cons: (Not really Cons... just nit-picks) - Board is heavy… but not shipped in anything other than cardboard. Would have liked more cushioning / foam to protect board. - Board is LARGE… full ATX size will require a large case. Tight fit in an ATX mid-case. - Board has horizontal SATA ports...WHY?!?!? Don’t they know what they do to us?!?! These are one of the worst things in the world. - BIOS is a little overkill (too much info)… it was too much info for me on a 55” TV… I can only imagine the overload on a 24” LCD screen - Included Sound Blaster X-FI MB3 utility won’t control HDMI audio. This board has "premium" audio capabilities... but I'll stick to my add-on audio card for superior audio. - Dual ethernet ports… but why? This wasn’t planned to be a server build. 1. Upon quick research… “teaming” or “link-aggregation” is often more reliable when two ethernet cards of the same EXACT model are used. This board has an Intel i217 and an Intel i210… ??? - 1394 headers??? Why? When’s the last time you used anything that needed firewire? IN THE YEAR TWO-THOUSAND… all computer motherboards came with 1394a headers… because that’s the fastest thing around… at the time - Other than smart fan control, that comes from the Ez-Setup app from the AppCenter… there isn’t really anything else of super-important use. It’s great I can set a password on the USB ports and lock them as I see it… but that’s not very useful to me

Overall Review: - One BSOD during a Windows Update reboot (configuring updates before login). Fixed after system rebooted and continued as normal - Steam In-Home streaming works as advertised! Had to lower the “quality” from “beautiful” to another setting (picture quality was great, actual game-play was laggy with quality set to “beautiful”) System configuration: a. Processor: Intel Pentium G3220 Haswell 3.0Ghz LGA 1150 b. Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD5H c. RAM: (2) CORSAIR XMS 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory Model d. Hard drive: SanDisk Ultra Plus SDSSDHP-064G-G26 2.5" 64GB SSD e. Case: LOGISYS Computer CS206BK Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer SOHO Case 480W Power Supply f. Operating system: Microsoft Windows 7 Pro SP1 x64 connect via high-speed HDMI to: YAMAHA RX-V373BL 5.1-Channel AV Receiver with: Vizio M550SL 55” LCD TV Don't Buy it: If you aren't going to be overclocking, I'd skip this board and keep looking... you'll save a few bucks that way. Buy it: if you plan on overclocking / value high quality. I imagine if I were going to overclock... I might seek out this board or one in the same price / feature neighborhood. If I were into overclocking AND saving money... I might skip this board and buy the newer version (GA-Z97X-UD5H) and save around $40 (which could be put to good use elsewhere during a PC build).

Pros: Nice looking motherboard, good layout. 12 usb 3.0 (with included 3.5" accessory), Plus more usb 3.0 depending on how many your PC case has mounted on front. Plenty of onboard fan headers to control all the fans you need for your cooling option. Cpu fan header and optional cpu fan header to run aftermarket cooling with 2 fans or water cooling setup. 10 sata III 6.0 gbs ports 6 intel and 4 marvell make it so you can run 2 raid setups. 4 ddr3 memory slots capable of running ram up to 3100mhz speed with bios settings. Lots of options in bios for overclocking your cpu, memory, plenty of voltage settings to tweak you overclocks for stability. Nice UEFI bios interface with the option to use classic mode in bios for easier setup if your not used to the newer UEFI configurations. 3 pci-express slots x16 x8 x4- Running 2 gpus in crossfire or SLI will run the pcie slots at x8 x8, pcie 3.0 with haswell Pentium cpu or higher, The haswell Celeron cpus do not support pcie 3.0 (only pcie 2.0). The board I received has not had any of the issues I have seen in other reviews, It was setup and running with no problems runs everything great and fast. My board came as revision 1.1 (not the rev. 1.0 that seems to have been the more troubling board). See cons and other thoughts.

Cons: I had only 1 con with this board, But it was nothing to dock an egg for. After first setup since I run a dedicated gpu I did what I would always do and went into bios and disabled the onboard graphics. Well needless to say after windows setup the default hd audio drivers from windows ran the sound fine, But after installing the realtek drivers the sound would stop working after the reboot of the install I tried everything with no luck. As it turns out with these haswell cpus on this board (not sure about other 1150 boards) you must leave the onboard graphics enabled to control the sound onboard as it is tied together. So easy fix, after calling gigabyte just enable the onboard graphics, install realtek sound drivers, then install the SB x-fi software and the sound is perfect and nice sound settings with the SB x-fi.

Overall Review: Great setup I paired this with a haswell intel core i3-4130 cpu, amd radeon r7 260x 2gb pcie 3.0 graphics card, 2x4gb=8gb G.Skill ripjaws X 1866 ram (set xmp profile 1 in bios). Ran cinebench r15 openGL scored 106 fps, on my AMD a10-6790k system with same vid card and ram score was only 72-75 fps, so pcie 3.0 setup makes a decent difference in fps for gaming. And for everyone that likes the WEI scores- cpu 7.3/ memory 7.7/ desktop 7.7/ gaming 7.7/ and HDD 5.9 highest mechanical HDDs go, SSD drives score higher on this. All in all I couldn't be happier with this motherboard, I recommend this board. Battlefield 4 plays super on my setup great game by the way. Complete setup- CFI bastet pc case Gigabyte ga-z87x-ud5h motherboard G.skill 8gb ripjaws x dual channel 1866 ram Amd radeon r7 260x 2gb ddr5 graphics card Corsair cx750m 750w modular power supply Intel core i3-4130 3.4ghz haswell cpu LG sata bluray burner/dvd burner Seagate sata III 1tb main HDD WD sata III 3tb storage HDD Zalman CNPS5X performa aftermarket cpu cooler.

Pros: Biggest plus is the BIOS. Given the low reviews (much like the board i had purchased before, the Z87X-OC) I would assume there were initially some BIOS bugs which have been worked out. It's a very easy to use system, I LOVE the menus where you can set up which settings you want to see, and then set the BIOS to automatically load those pages when you load it. The extra Marvell SATA controller is a nice addition for someone like me who has many hard drives and burners as I do a lot of video editing work. 10 SATA ports in all. The power management on the board is very nice, it actually has the same 16 phase CPU power management setup. It does lack the additional power input of my Z87X-OC but I was ultimately able to hit the same overclock I had on my 4770k as the OC board would be more advantageous in exotic cooling situations. The built-in overclocking algorithms worked very well. For those who either don't have the time or experience to fine tune the settings and push their CPU the motherboard has several settings to handle it for you. I tried the maximum setting of 4.7GHz and it was perfectly stable for 8 hours of Prime95. The bundled X-Fi MB software helps the Realtek ALC898 by giving some added adjustability and should prove more than capable for a vast majority of users. Without some very expensive headsets you won't notice a very big difference. I've saved my two favorite pieces for last: the dual LAN and 1394 inclusion. The dual LAN has support for teaming which is absolutely fantastic and worked flawlessly (after proper configuration) on my two separate networks. FireWire may be about dead nowadays but I still have a couple of digital video recorders that use firewire. They're tough old cameras that I don't mind putting in harms way for certain events and having built in support on a modern motherboard made me quite happy.

Cons: The biggest con with this motherboard is quite typical of Z87 motherboards. Haswell CPUs provide 16 lanes of PCI express 3.0 and the Z87 provides only 8 lanes of PCIe 2.0. Essentially what you end up with is your graphics cards (x16 slots) running off the CPU and your x1 slots and other additions by the motherboard manufacturer powered by the chipset. With SLI (and now I believe the new AMD cards in crossfire) has a requirement of 8 lanes per card you are limited to 2-way SLI despite having a 3rd slot on the board. Installing anything in that third slot will drop the bottom two slots to x4 rendering it ultimately useless for anything other than computing (cryptocurrency, folding@home, etc)

Overall Review: Seeing the existing reviews and my initial experience with my Z87X-OC I was a bit apprehensive about this board's arrival and having to tear down my setup for a mobo that may have issues. Add to that a water pump failure early on in my overclocking tests put me in a rather stressed state. After picking up an air cooler on sale from a local store and a few deep breaths, I actually quite liked this motherboard. Between my two Gigabyte boards I will be sticking with this one for my primary usage as it just has the additional features the OC board doesn't. I found a stable spot at 4.8GHz and don't intend to try my hand at phase change/liquid nitrogen cooling so the extreme overclocking features of the other board will go unused. While having 3 x16 slots but ultimately only being able to do 2 way SLI is a bit of an annoyance (the OC has 4 slots but again, more than 3 drops to x4 as well), the price point is such that I think it offers what should be expected of a $200 board. I had considered dropping my review by one egg for this, and if this board were maybe $50 more I would have, but for this price I honestly believe it's fair.

Pros: Good overall design 10 sata ports with support for raid 0,1,10 Gold plated CPU socket, Dual Ethernet ports, cross-fire support, room for expansion OC memory speeds up to DDR3 3000… but the voltage/speed would depend on and need to match the capabilities of your CPU. The Intel i7’s typically run lower voltages and the BIOS auto-tune feature can mess up the voltages sometimes Overclocked the CPU to 4.2ghz on air and with a EVGA GTX 760 Vid Card, this combo beat my Asus Sabertooth Z77 with an Ivy bridge and EVGA GTX 670 FTW USB 3.0 front module is helpful because it would work in any case that has space for the bay Idles at around 8 watts with an i7-4770k Bios is easy to navigate and has auto-configuration feature

Cons: The CPU FAN / CPU OPT / SYS FAN2 headers are placed in a somewhat non-standard place on the motherboard. The pin below the socket and in the center of the motherboard kind of messed up some cable management for me UEFI bios didn’t recognize my Microsoft mouse Auto-tuning to maximum performance caused a Windows dialog box to pop up after about 30 minutes and warn me of overheating – that was a little scary, but I was only using a stock fan to cool the CPU DVI port and PS2 port seem to be less common these days. It’s good to have options for different display outputs, but in the end, you will probably end up only using one (or none if you have a graphics card). The Ivy-bridge processors consume less power than the Broadwell processors and are only slightly slower than Broadwell Might be worthwhile to wait for USB 4.0, next gen CPUs, because Broadwell is marginally faster than Ivy

Overall Review: Luckily for me, I’ve never had a firmware update malfunction on a motherboard – if we are paying extra the dual bios… is it really necessary? It looks like Broadwell is also supposed to be compatible with the LGA 1150 socket, but the Z87 chipset may not be… Read a lot of complaints about BSOD in Windows 7, but Windows 8.1 worked well for me

Pros: Very well laid out and solid construction. This board has some serious weight to it. Everything works, tried both NIC and no issues, all USB ports work. Make sure to flash to the latest F6 bios to clear up some issues. Install 8 gigs of Mushkin 1.5v redline, picked XMP and it's all set. I did turn off all halt steps except C1E and speed step, I don't put my computer to sleep ever but I do allow it to clock down at idle. Using 7-64, fast and smooth, zero driver issues. W8 has it's own problems and growing pains, 7 is mature. Bios flashing is extremely easy to do unlike the old days of floppy's and not having a backup bios just in case something went wrong. It literally takes 10 seconds to flash, load your settings and done.

Cons: None, I bought on sale for $205 which was the running price for top Abit boards 6+ years ago and this board is way more solid and feature packed. F6 bios clears up issues, I expect more revisions for issues other people seem to have but I have not experienced. Using onboard GPU for now, possible the inclusion of ATI or NVidia drivers could cause conflicts but unlikely.

Overall Review: No issues with software, Easytune works great. I grabbed all the latest drivers from their site beforehand and installed them all manually in order, chipset, vga, raid, usb and sound. I do notice I cannot get the Realtek as loud as I can with my 10 year old Turtle beach santa cruz even with the front amplified headphone. ALC898 is decent but should be louder. Realmark audio analysis shows it has the same specs as the Santa cruz, odd. SB suite does help, music does sound great. I bought this over the UD4H due to the sound package, 4 Marvell ports and duel Nic's for teaming. The premium was $10, a complete no-brainer. Happy so far, too early to tell about longevity but I do have a EP45UD3R still rocking the past 6 years without a single problem.

Pros: • Flat black PCB looks great and is how every board should be, no more dark brown PCBs! • Black solid state capacitors look amazing on this board • POST’s fairly quick at 9 seconds with fast boot on an EFI boot • Has 7 four pin PWM fan headers, 5 system fans one CPU and one OPT CPU fan header • Dual Intel gigabyte LAN’s that support Teaming and shows you how to set that up in the manual • Dual bios with switches to change between them and an LED indicator showing which is being utilized. • Debug LED indicator (Given the direction of most boards in a standard case it should be horizontal not vertical as this make it harder to read once in a case). Has the most customizable bios I’ve ever seen. Has 4 tabs that can be setup however you like, with whatever settings you want all with a name of your choosing. Also you can set what screen you want to see first once you enter the bios. If using a 1080p display the bios displays very helpful information such as the CPU and memory status on the left and system status on the right which all includes voltages, temperatures, frequency information, fan RPM’s, etc. The driver disc has an option called Express Install which installs everything as a batch so you don’t have to deal with any prompts of any kind, just select what you want to install and it does all the work. Also the Gigabyte App Center is nice as it has a Live update feature that checks for driver and program updates for you which is much easier than doing it the old fashion way. Easy Tune is a really nice overclocking software as it has a ton of options and settings for tweaking your overclock. Has a very good fan calibration software which allows for fairly precise fan curves to be made however you like based on the temperature of your system. Features the best built in audio in a motherboard that I have yet to test. The dynamic range is great at 92.2 dB and the noise (Interference from surrounding parts) which is usually poor on built in audio solutions (Around -52 dB) was at -81.2 dB which rivals a cheap sound card. The audio codec is a Realtek ALC898 but comes with Creative SBX Pro Studio software with a bunch of add on features to improve your audio experience like an equalizer, smart volume, dialog enhancement, etc. The user’s manual has a helpful description of all of the bios settings and the RAID modes its supports, how they work, the benefits of each and how to set each of them up. Also features a very useful troubleshooting section at the back of the user’s manual for diagnosing hardware or boot related problems.

Cons: The bios is not organized very well and feels very cluttered and busy as many areas within the DASHBOARD are just a long list of items with no separation or organization. The Classic bios actually divided items up better and is easier to follow. Some items from the new DASHBAORD when clicked take you to the classic bios which is weird and should not be setup that way. Either make it work in both or remove it till it does. In the bios, hovering over items reveals a helpful description of its function but it is formatted in a tiny scrolling line at the bottom of the screen which is difficult to read. This is more bothersome due to the fact that there is a giant blank space on the right with plenty of room for this information to be displayed. To make this more compelling, as far as I can tell nothing is ever displayed there except the calendar and favorites section which is only displayed when on the Home tab. It’s available real state, use it! Auto tuning and built in OC profiles are terrible (Except for the Light Profile) as it places an enormous overvolt on the CPU as well as the auto values in the bios such as for the Ring voltage as shown below: • Auto Tuning OC @ 4.3 GHz • Vcore Voltage: 1.391 volts • CPU Ring Voltage: 1.439 volts • Light OC Profile @ 4.1 GHz • Vcore Voltage: 1.193 volts • CPU Ring Voltage: 1.145 volts • Medium OC Profile @ 4.3 GHz • Vcore Voltage: 1.391 volts • CPU Ring Voltage: 1.439 volts • Heavy OC Profile @ 4.5 GHz • Vcore Voltage: 1.391 volts • CPU Ring Voltage: 1.439 volts • Manual OC @ 4.5 GHz • Vcore Voltage: 1.31 volts • CPU Ring Voltage: 1.16 volts Bios logo is “Gigabyte Insist on Ultra Durable” and it is written horizontally and as Windows 8 uses that as its boot logo when installed via UEFI it looks dumb. It should be vertical with “Gigabyte” written on top with “Insist on Ultra Durable” listed below it. Odd placement of CMOS battery as it is right under the CPU socket and if using a big heatsink it could be very difficult to get to. There is a CMOS reset button on the upper right hand corner of the board though so this isn’t really a big issue.

Overall Review: Overall this a great motherboard that has a lot of pleasing features with just a few minor draw backs. The bios is much improved over the look and feel of previous implementations especially if running on a 1080p display but has some areas where things need to be improved. Like many other motherboards I have tested the auto overclocking features and OC profiles still suck as they play it overly safe to ensure stability while if used long term will damage your CPU. This board overclocks great, but make sure you do it manually. If using overclocking profiles and the bios don’t matter to you then this board is a perfect buy. CPU: Intel i7-4770K Tested OS: Windows 8.1 Pro x64

Pros: Great board overall great layout super easy to use bios. Has my 4770K running at 4.5Ghz with just a few simple changes. Gigabyte has always been my number one go to for great motherboards. Has everything an enthusiast gamer or even everyday joe needs to have an awesome running rig.

Cons: the only con I have is really guys what were you thinking. The cpu fan headers right under the socket?? Havent seen that placement in ages.

Overall Review: If your looking for a great board for your 1150 cpu that will take it to the next levle whether overclocking or not Grab this baby its so simple and easy to use its a no breainer

Pros: Overclocking is very easy Lots of ports, and features more then I will ever need Everything works wonders. Never had a computer this fast before, or this easy to overclock.

Cons: Needed to update bios, and recommend this to everybody. Doesn't have bluetooth