GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H (Intel Z87) Motherboard Review

Looking for a cheaper Intel Z87 solution? This stylish looking Z87X-UD4H from GIGABYTE could be just what you need. Let's take a look now.

Published
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Manufacturer: GIGABYTE
12 minutes & 46 seconds read time

Introduction and Package

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GIGABYTE, like most of the top-tier motherboard manufacturers, has just a massive line up of motherboards that use mainstream chipsets like the Z87. Recently, we've had a chance to look at a couple of different boards, and they've all managed to stand out for different reasons. If you're looking for something that focuses more on the overclocking side of things, while still offering just a ton of features, then the impressive Z87X-OC Force is an attractive option.

If the Z87X-OC Force is all a little bit too much, the Z87X-UD5TH, which features a slick color scheme and Thunderbolt, is another option that looks good. If your main focus is gaming, though, and you'd prefer to see features that improve both audio and networking, then the gamer designed G1.Sniper Z87 is awesome, thanks to its Killer Networking and AMP-UP audio technology.

Today, we're going to be looking at the Z87X-UD4H. As the name suggests, it comes in below the UD5TH in terms of the Ultra Durable series, and the lack of TH means that it doesn't carry Thunderbolt. The removal of a few features means that the price tag also comes down. Priced at under the $200 mark, the Z87X-UD4H could be quite the option for people who are looking for something that is not going to break the bank account. Of course, before we find out if it's something that we'd really recommend, we need to take a closer look at just what's on offer.

So, let's start with the package and move forward from there.

Package

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Taking a look at the box, we don't really see anything too out of the ordinary when it comes to the overall design. You can see the brand and model on the front and some of the main features that related to Ultra Durable 5 Plus, which includes Ultra Cool, Ultra Performance, Ultra Safe, and Ultra USB 3+.

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Turning the box over, you can see we go into more detail in regards to some of the major features, including Durable Black Solid Caps, All IR Digital Power Design, Gaming Headphone Amplifier, UEFI DualBIOS, and a couple of other features like Quick Buttons, SATA3, and more, which we'll take a closer look at on the next page.

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Moving inside the box, you can see there's not a whole lot to the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H package, with the standard paperwork and Driver CD being present alongside four SATA 3 cables, a single SLI connector, and our standard I/O panel.

GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H (Intel Z87) Motherboard

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Taking a look at the board, you can see the color scheme is in line with what we saw out of the Z87X-UD5TH, which is, of course, the black and red setup. We've got the nice matte black PCB and red highlights on the heat sinks. Let's move in a bit closer, though, to see just what's going on with the Z87X-UD4H.

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Looking at the expansion slots, you can see we've got a single legacy PCI slot towards the bottom of the board. Along with that, we've got three PCIe x1 slots and three PCIe x16 slots. If you're going to be using just the one video card, then it will run at x16. If you opt for SLI or CrossFire, then both cards will run at 8x. If you opt to use the third slot, then the second and third slot will run at 4x.

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Moving to the bottom of the board, you can see the standard line up of headers, including USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, front panel audio, 3-Pin fan, and our main front panel header in the bottom right corner.

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As we turn the corner, you can see we've got another 3-Pin fan header and a total of eight SATA ports. The six black SATA ports are all SATA III and run off the Intel Z87 controller. Along with those, we have a further two SATA III ports that are grey. These run off the Marvell 88SE9172 chip. Finally, you can see we've got a SATA power connector towards the top of the ports. While not required, if you're opting for a higher-end CrossFire or SLI setup, you can add the SATA power cable here to make sure that the PCIe slots have more than enough power to run everything.

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Heading to the top of the board, you can see all the usual suspects here. We've got four DIMM slots offering support for up to 32GB of DDR3 ranging in speed from 1333MHz DDR3 to 3000MHz DDR3 via overclocking. Under that, we have our LED Debug meter, USB 3.0 header, 3-Pin fan header, and our main 24-Pin ATX power connector. In the top corner, you can see we've got our quick switches, which include a BIOS switch alongside a reset one and a larger power button.

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Like most CPU areas these days, it's a very clean setup. You can also take a closer look at the black and red color scheme with bits of silver. We've become a huge fan of this color scheme from GIGABYTE, and just like the Z87X-UD5TH, it looks great. Towards the top corner of the board, we finish our look with the 8-Pin CPU connector and a 4-Pin CPU fan header.

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Heading over to the I/O side of things, you can see we've got a combo PS/2 port along with six USB 3.0 ports. Video output options come via VGA, DVI-D, HDMI, and DisplayPort, while audio comes via six auxiliary ports and an optical out, all which run off the Realtek ALC898 codec. Finally, we finish off with two eSATA 6GB/s ports that run off the Marvell 88SE9172 chip, and a Gigabit networking port that runs off the Intel chipset.

BIOS

With us having looked at a bunch of GIGABYTE boards lately, you're not going to find anything new going into the BIOS. The only real difference is the color scheme.

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As always, though, we'll mention that if you're heading into the BIOS, you'll no doubt be spending most your time around the Home and Performance section. It's under these two areas you find everything overclocking related.

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Jumping through the rest of the tabs, you can see all the standard options on offer. There's really not too much that needs to be said as everything is self-explanatory thanks to all the screenshots.

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Hitting F2, we can go back into Classic Mode. While this is where we'd normally go straight away, the latest rendition of the UEFI BIOS from GIGABYTE is fantastic and we find ourselves using the default option all the time now, which looks great thanks to the HD feature on offer.

Benchmarks - Test System Setup and Overclocking

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We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: Intel, ASUS, MSI, Western Digital, MemoRight and Corsair.

As usual, we've got a bunch of boards in our graphs here today. On the Z87 front, we've got the G1.Sniper and Z87X-OC Force, both Z87 boards from GIGABYTE. Along with those, we've also got the ASRock Z87 OC Formula here in our graphs today. Alongside that, we've also got the MSI Z77A-GD65 Gaming and GIGABYTE X79S-UP5-Wi-Fi to round off our collection of motherboards today.

Before we get into the performance of the board, we have to quickly take the time to cover the overclocking side of things. The process is all very typical. We head into the BIOS, try the 50x Multiplier to see if we can get 5GHz stable, and then get into Windows to discover that we aren't able to get the system running 100 percent.

We head back into the BIOS, move to the 49x Multiplier, and make sure everything is working. Once we know everything is going smooth, we fire up the BIOS again and see if we can do some tweaking with the BCLK and voltages to get higher than the often-common 4.9GHz.

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With a bit of time and a whole lot of messing around with voltages, we ended up with a 101.5 BCLK to go alongside our 49x Multiplier. Together, this gives us a clock of 4975.13MHz, or 4.975GHz, as illustrated in our graphs here today. This is a really fantastic overclock and should bring with it some strong gains in performance over the default clock speed.

CPU Benchmarks

HyperPi 0.99

Version and / or Patch Used: 0.99

Developer Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br

Product Homepage: www.virgilioborges.com.br

Download It Here

HyperPi is a front end for SuperPi that allows for multiple concurrent instances of SuperPi to be run on each core recognized by the system. It is very dependent on CPU to memory to HDD speed. The faster these components, the faster it is able to figure out the number Pi to the selected length.

For our testing we use the 32M run. This means that each of the four physical and four logical cores for the i7 and the four physical cores of the i5 is trying to calculate the number Pi out to 32 million decimal places. Each "run" is a comparative to ensure accuracy and any stability or performance issues in the loop mentioned above will cause errors in calculation.

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AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

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Out of the box, the performance of the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H really falls in line with the majority of our other Z87 boards. You can see, looking above, though, that the Z87X-OC Force managed an awesome Hyper Pi score out of the box.

As for overclocking, the strong 4.975GHz clock makes for an awesome performance boost. You can see our Hyper Pi score comes in under 11 minutes, and our AIDA64 numbers shoot right up.

System Benchmarks

PCMark 7

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.04

Developer Homepage: http://www.pcmark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.pcmark.com

Buy It Here

PCMark 7 includes a range of tests that give different views of your system's performance. In the Advanced Edition you can choose which tests to run. The common use and hardware component tests are unavailable in the Basic Edition.

Overall system performance is measured by the PCMark test. This is the only test that returns an official PCMark score. The Lightweight test measures the system capabilities of entry-level systems and mobility platforms unable to run the PCMark test, but it does not generate a PCMark score. Common use performance is measured by the scenario tests - Entertainment, Creativity and Production - each of which results in a scenario score. Hardware component performance is measured by the hardware tests - Computation and Storage - each of which results in a hardware score.

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MediaEspresso

Version and / or Patch Used: 6.5

Developer Homepage: http://www.cyberlink.com/

Product Homepage: http://www.cyberlink.com/products/mediaespresso/overview_en_AU.html?fileName=overview&r=1

Buy It Here

MediaEspresso is a blazingly fast media universal converter that can transcode your videos, photos and music files and out put them to a huge range of portable devices including mobile phones, portable media players and even game consoles. With technologies like Smart Detect, Direct Sync and CyberLink's TrueTheaterâ„¢ video enhancements, you can not only forget about complicated format, resolution and output settings, but your converted file will come out the other side looking better than when it went in!

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PCMark 7 and MediaEspresso performance also lines up with our GIGABYTE G1.Sniper Z87 and ASRock Z87 OC FORMULA. When it comes to overclocking, you can see we really do get extremely strong gains.

PCMark comes in at over 7,000 marks and MediaEspresso gets 20 percent shaved off the encode time, bringing us in at just over 14 minutes and 30 seconds.

USB 2.0 and 3.0 Benchmarks

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.70.1400

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

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Looking above, you can see the performance of our USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 drives are just as you'd expect with nothing out of the ordinary being seen here.

SSD Benchmarks

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.70.1400

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

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HD Tune Pro

Version and / or Patch Used: 4.61

Developer Homepage: http://www.hdtune.com

Product Homepage: http://www.hdtune.com

Buy It Here

HD Tune Pro gives us accurate read, write and access time results and for the last couple of years has been gaining popularity amongst reviewers. It is now considered a must have application for storage device testing.

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AIDA64 SSD numbers are strong across the board, lining up with the top performing motherboards here.

HD Tune Pro sees a lower minimum read speed, but you can see that the maximum and average are extremely strong when compared to our other Z87 offerings.

Memory Benchmarks

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA

Developer Homepage: http://www.aida64.com

Product Homepage: http://www.AIDA64.com

Buy It Here

Replacing Everest in our labs is AIDA64. This new testing suite is from the core development team from Lavalys and continues that tradition. The guys have thrown in better support for multithreaded CPUs as well as full 64 bit support. We use this to test memory and HDDs for now, but may find ourselves opening this up to other areas of the motherboard.

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Memory performance on the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H is in line with the G1.Sniper Z87. You can see that both boards lag slightly behind the more focused offerings from both GIGABYTE and ASRock.

As for overclocking, you can see in typical fashion that there's no change and nothing more than fluctuation being seen.

Gaming Benchmarks

3DMark 11

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.0

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.3dmark.com/3dmark11/

Buy It Here

3DMark 11 is the latest version of the world's most popular benchmark. Designed to measure your PC's gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

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Metro 2033

Version and / or Patch Used: Latest Steam Update

Timedemo or Level Used: Built in Benchmark

Developer Homepage: http://www.4a-games.com//

Product Homepage: http://www.thqnordic.com/

Metro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games in Ukraine and released in March 2010 for Microsoft Windows and Xbox 360.[3] In March 2006, 4A Games announced a partnership with Glukhovsky to collaborate on the game.[4] The game was announced at the 2009 Games Convention in Leipzig;[5] a first trailer came along with the announcement.[6] A sequel was announced, currently titled Metro: Last Light.

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Video performance is, as always, very standard. There's little difference at stock between all of our setups, and, when overclocking is thrown into the mix, we see a bit of positive movement at the lower resolutions where the CPU plays a bigger part, but no change as we climb the resolution table.

Temperature and Power

Power Consumption

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Power draw out of the box is strong; you can see the idle and load numbers at stock are lower than all of our other Z87 offerings.

The overclock numbers are also fantastic; the idle is equally as low and the load number at 329 Watts is impressive, especially considering the strong overclock on offer.

Core Temperature

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CPU Temperature numbers are equally as impressive out of the box, with a great idle and load number being shown.

Overclocked, though, the load number of 84c is fantastic, especially when we consider the excellent overclock we managed.

Pricing, Availability and Final Thoughts

At the time of writing, the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H is going to set you back around the $200 mark, which is one of the cheaper options when compared to other recent GIGABYTE offerings we've looked at. The board really is priced perfectly. It looks great and offers more than enough features for most people.

Performance on the board, though, is really fantastic. Out of the box, it performs as you would expect. Overclocking was really fantastic, though, and while it falls short of the 5GHz number we're always-on the hunt for, the 4.975GHz we received is the strongest clock we've seen in a while.

I think what makes it look even more impressive, though, is the fact it's done with a load temperature of just 84c. Yes, while that's indeed warm, we've had boards clock at 4.9GHz and offer temperatures of 95c+. The numbers we see out of the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H really do look fantastic next to these ones.

The package is a little on the light side of things compared to some others, but the market this is aimed at and the price means that it's fairly standard. Of course, everything is always relative. If this was a $400 motherboard, we wouldn't be so impressed, but at $200, GIGABYTE lets the product itself do the talking and it really does a good job of selling itself.

If you don't want features like Thunderbolt, crazy amounts of overclocking features, or a board that is more focused towards just gamers, the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H is the kind of product you should be on the hunt for. The price is strong, the look is great, and performance is just as strong.

PRICING: You can find the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H Motherboard for sale below. The prices listed are valid at the time of writing, but can change at any time. Click the link to see the very latest pricing for the best deal.

United States: The GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H Motherboard retails for $199.04 at Amazon.

Canada: The GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force (Intel Z87) Motherboard retails for $227.05 at Amazon Canada.

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PRICING: You can find products similar to this one for sale below.

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Shawn takes care of all of our video card reviews. From 2009, Shawn is also taking care of our memory reviews, and from May 2011, Shawn also takes care of our CPU, chipset and motherboard reviews. As of December 2011, Shawn is based out of Taipei, Taiwan.

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