Gigabyte Z87X-UD5 TH Thunderbolt Motherboard Review

Mainstream motherboards never come with many included goodies and the Z87X-UD5 TH 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.  For those of you using AMD GPUs you can install three cards but will have to supply your own Crossfire cables.

Of course onboard WiFi is only helpful when you also get a remote antenna and the one Gigabyte includes is quite nice.   The final included item is a USB 3.0 breakout panel allowing you access to USB 3.0 if your particular chassis doesn’t come with it or two additional ports if you happen to need more.

Thunderbolt technology is a transformational I/O innovation that provides performance gains over current I/O technologies.  Each Thunderbolt channel supports 10 Gbps of full-duplex bandwidth and simplifies the end-user experience by concurrently supporting data over PCI Express and video over DisplayPort with a single cable. Thunderbolt products may be connected using electrical or optical cables are not limited to just a single device per physical connection.

Like all new technologies it takes time for them to be adopted and for the prices of the contingent components to become affordable.  For instance Thunderbolt cables are still quite expensive due to the technology required to make them work.  The price is well worth it considering the long list of advantages the technology provides.

The Gigabyte implementation can support up to 12 devices and two displays using the two included connections.  This translates into a variety of high speed access to external storage devices or the ability to drive a three display desktop without the use of a discrete graphics card.   For those of you excited for 4K video displays the onboard Thunderbolt can provide the bandwidth.  All you need is the panel and a dream.