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Gigabyte Z87-D3HP review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £107
inc VAT

This fairly inexpensive board is a great base for your 4th-gen Intel Core PC

Specifications

LGA1150, ATX, Intel Z87 chipset, supports: 4th-gen Core i3, Core i5, Core i7

http://www.scan.co.uk

The Gigabyte Z87-D3HP is an ATX motherboard that caters for Intel’s 4th-generation “Haswell” Core processors. As implied by its name, the Z87-D3HP uses the Z87 chipset, the successor to the 3rd-generation Z77 chipset.

Gigabyte Z87-D3HP

The Z87 provides up to six SATA3 ports, which means every drive can potentially benefit from the fastest SATA speeds currently possible. It also means you no longer have to juggle a limited number of SATA connections between drives, you can just plug in a new drive and be confident that its capable of running at the best speed.

The Z87 also provides a greater number of USB3 ports, with the Z87-D3HP providing no less than six on its back panel and a further four through the use of the board’s USB3 headers. Sadly, Gigabyte doesn’t include USB3 brackets with the board, which means you’ll have to use your case’s USB3 brackets or buy your own to make use of the headers. The Z87-D3HP also provides two USB2 ports on its back panel and two USB2 headers.

Gigabyte Z87-D3HP

Other connections include a legacy PS2 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, an optical S/PDIF port and 5 analogue audio ports for surround sound. The Z87-D3HPs also has HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs, and you can make use of all of them, as the Z87 chipset lets you output video to three monitors at once.

Expansion ports include two PCI-E x16 slots, one of which runs at x4, two PCI-E x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots. The board also supports CrossFire, should you be lucky enough to have two compatible AMD graphics cards. This is a pretty good selection of expansion ports, but we think it would best suit those with a single graphics card.

Gigabyte Z87-D3HP

We were impressed with the Z87-D3HP’s performance compared to Intel’s “reference” DZ87KLT-75K motherboard. When used with a Core i7-4770K, 4GB of Corsair XMS3 RAM running at 1600MHz and a Crucial M4 SSD, the Intel board scored 109 overall in our benchmark tests. The Gigabyte board scored 111 overall with the same setup. That’s a small increase in overall scores, but the gap between the two boards widened in the Z87-D3HP’s favour the higher we overclocked the processor. With a 4.6GHz CPU overclock applied, the Intel board scored 125 overall, while the Z87-D3HP scored 132.

Testing with the Best Buy winning Intel Core i5-4670K, we saw equally as impressive benchmark results, with an overall score of 112.

Despite its reasonable price, the Gigabyte Z87-D3HP still has a good selection of expansion inside and display and USB3 connectors on the outside. If you want a fairly inexpensive board on which to base your 4th-generation Intel Core system then this is a good choice.

Basic Specifications

Rating*****
Processor socketLGA1150
Form factorATX
Size305x224mm
Processor support4th-gen Core i3, Core i5, Core i7
Processor external bus100MHz
Chipset north bridgeIntel Z87
Chipset south bridgeIntel Z87
Passively-cooled north bridgeyes
Integrated graphicsYes
Supported memory typeDDR3
Maximum memory speedPC3-12800
Memory slots4
Maximum memory32GB
Dual-channel supportyes

Buying Information

Price£107
Supplierhttp://www.scan.co.uk
Detailswww.gigabyte.com

Internal Ports

Power connectors1x 24-pin ATX, 1x 8-pin ATX
PCI-E x16 slots2
Dual graphics architectureCrossFire
PCI-E x4 slots0
PCI-E x1 slots2
PCI slots2
Fan headers3
Floppy ports0
IDE ports0
Serial ATA ports0
RAID chipset (max disks)Intel Z87 (RAID 0, 1, 5, 10)

Features

Wired network ports1x 10/100/1000
Sound (ports)Realtek ALC892 (5x analogue out, optical S/PDIF)
USB2 ports / headers8/4
Firewire ports / headers0/0
Legacy portsserial header
Other portsVGA, DVI, HDMI
Cables included2x SATA
Brackets includednone
Software includednone

Setup and Overclocking

Voltage adjustmentCPU/RAM/chipset
CPU clock max adjustment266MHz

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