Layout

At a first glance the Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H is good looking. The manfucaturer decided to go for a combination of black and gold. In fact the PCB is kept in matte black entirely and the coolers are painted gold. The layout is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install large coolers without an issue. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allow an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.


The Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H comes with a digital 8+2 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases and the memory can rely on two phases for stable current delivery. As we already mentioned on the features page, this board comes with a digital power design, which is standard already with mid-range motherboards these days.



Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Z97X-UD3H. Officially supported are DDR3 3000(O.C.) / 2933(O.C.) / 2800(O.C.) / 2666(O.C.) / 2600(O.C.) / 2500(O.C.) / 2400(O.C.) / 2200(O.C.) / 2133(O.C.) / 2000(O.C.) / 1866(O.C.) / 1800(O.C.) / 1600 / 1333 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you won't run into issues with large coolers even if you choose to install memory with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 1.3.


PCH as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via passive heatsinks. On another note it is nice feeling, that this board is actually heavier than average, which is always a good indicator on how serious a manufacturer is about a certain product. Other than that we were surprised to see that the thermal pads on the heatsinks cover far more than just the VRM ICs.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 14 - SiSoft Sandra 2
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 15 - UC Bench
Page 3 - Features	Page 16 - Super Pi 1M / 32M
Page 4 - Layout	Page 17 - wPrime 1024M Multi Core
Page 5 - Connectors and I/O	Page 18 - Cinebench
Page 6 - BIOS	Page 19 - Bioshock: Infinite
Page 7 - Test setup	Page 20 - Metro Last Light
Page 8 - Preview / Gallery	Page 21 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 9 - 3D Mark	Page 22 - Power Consumption
Page 10 - 3D Mark 11	Page 23 - Performance Rating
Page 11 - 3D Mark Vantage	Page 24 - Price Comparison
Page 12 - PC Mark 7	Page 25 - Conclusion
Page 13 - SiSoft Sandra 1