GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H Motherboard

Moving onto the board the first thing we notice is the killer matte black color scheme that GIGABYTE has implemented. Just because we're dealing with a cheaper board, it doesn't mean we have to deal with an ugly one. You can also see the heatsink setup and the general layout.

Moving in a bit closer you can see the expansion slots. We've got three PCIe x1 slots along with three PCIe x16 slots in an x16 / x8 /4 configuration, which offers support for both SLI and CrossFire. Finally you can see that GIGABYTE has also thrown in an older legacy PCI slot.

As we move across to the bottom of the board we see most of the usual headers here including front audio, three USB 2.0, TPM and a couple of fan headers. On the right side you can see the BIOS switch next to the front panel connector and finally a LED debug reader on the right that helps solving any boot up problems easier.

As we turn the corner you can see we've got a total of eight SATA ports on offer. In the middle we've got four black SATA II ports which run off the Intel Z77 chip. Either side we've got two SATA III ports - two run off the same Intel Z77 chipset, while the other two run off the Marvell 88SE9172 chip. We can also see a fan header to the left and to the right a power header that helps provide some extra power to the board if you need it.

Moving towards the top half of the board we can see four DIMM slots which support up to 32GB of DDR3 at speeds ranging from 1066MHz DDR to 2800MHz DDR via overclocking. Across the bottom we have to the left a USB 3.0 header, main 24-pin ATX power connector along with a few buttons on the right which include power, reset and clear CMOS.

As we head on over to the CPU area you can see the main 8-pin ATX power connector and moving back a bit you can see our socket and heatsink setup. There's a really clean setup going on here that should have no problem with big coolers.

Finally we finish off our look at the motherboard with the I/O side of things which includes a combo PS/2 port and six USB 3.0 ports that run off a combination of the Intel Z77 chipset and the VIA VL800 Chip. Video out is offered via VGA, DVI-D, HDMI and Display Port. The two eSATA 6GB/s ports run off the Marvell 88SE9172 controller. We've also got Gigabit networking off the Realtek controller and finally we've got six auxiliary ports and an optical out running off the Realtek ALC892.