Gigabyte Z87X UD4H Motherboard Review

Much to our disappointment Gigabyte has moved the debug LED from the lower corner to the area just behind the 24-pin power plug.  While this doesn't seem to be a huge issue it does make reading the POST codes a little more difficult than it should be.

A great feature found on the Z87X-UD4H is the inclusion of some benchtop controls including power, reset and CMOS clear.  These come in handy when the motherboard is used outside of a chassis or when you are troubleshooting an issue.  Another feature is the ability to check the various system voltages in real time, and you can do that using the test pads located under the power button. 

You will notice two small switches near the power button that can override the default dual BIOS features allowing you to save different BIOS images and boot to each one independently.

Behind the PWM cooler you'll find the 8 pin CPU power connector with plenty of room to access install and remove the plug when needed.

Internal SATA connections number eight and follow the new SATA6 connection standard.  The black ports come directly from the Z87 chipset while the grey ports come from a Gigabyte branded Marvell SATA controller.  These secondary SATA6 connections that can be used for additional drives or dedicated to RAID 0/1 independent of the chipset.   

You may notice a SATA power connection to the right of the SATA ports, this provides extra power to the PCI Express slots which can be helpful when running more than one graphics card or when the cards pull extremely high amounts of power.  

The Z87X-UD4H I/O panel is quite full and rather unique for a mainstream motherboard.  You will find a single combined PS/2 keyboard and mouse plug, six USB 3.0 ports (blue), a single gigabit Ethernet connection, 2x eSATA (sata6 spec) and 8 channel analog audio with digital connections over optical.  Onboard video is handled by 1x DSUB, 1x DVI-D, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort.

Mainstream motherboards never come with many included goodies and the Z87X-UD4H is no exception.  You will get everything you see here including a very detailed user manual.  

This motherboard does support dual card SLI using the included bridge cable so you have no excuse for why a secondary nVidia GTX video card isn't in your system.