Introduction

Lately we've had a chance to look at a few GIGABYTE motherboards and just Z77 motherboards in general. We saw GIGABYTE finally bring us a great looking mITX offering in the form of the Z77N-WiFi, we also saw BIOSTAR show off a Hi-Fi orientated board in the form of the Hi-Fi Z77X. Along with those two boards we also recently checked out the mid-range GIGABYTE Z77X-UD4H which did a good job of impressing us.

Today we're looking at a board that comes in below the $164.99 price tag that's seen on the Z77X-UD4H. Instead the Z77-HD4 comes in at an aggressively priced $129.99. What does this mean for the overall performance of the board and just the general quality when compared to its big brother the Z77X-UD4H? Well, we're not really sure. But we'll have figured it out by the time we get to the end of this review.

As always there are a few things that we need to do. First we need to start off by looking at the package. We're not expecting a lot due to the price point, but we'll of course see just what's on offer. Once we've done that it's onto the board itself. We'll cover the overall look and the main features that are present before we head into the BIOS. We'll quickly cover our testbed today while also taking the time to overclock the Intel Core i7 3770k before we finally get into the performance side of things to find out just what the GIGABYTE Z77-UD4 is capable of.

Package

Looking at the box we've got a fairly standard setup. The front gives us the model number and some of the main features including Dual UEFI BIOS, 3D BIOS and Ultra Durable 4 support. The back of the box then goes on to expand what those features offer along with an overall look at the board itself along with some of the highlights.

Moving inside the package we've got a small bundle which doesn't come as a surprise. We've got some paperwork, driver CD, four SATA cables and the standard I/O panel to round things off.