Layout

At a first glance the Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H is good looking. The manfucaturer decided to go for a combination of black and gold. In fact the PCB is kept in matte black entirely and the coolers are painted gold. The layout is well thought and there is for example plenty of space around the CPU socket to install large coolers without an issue. The fact that there are SATA connectors which have been angled by 90 degrees allow an easy installation of oversized graphics cards.


The Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H comes with a digital 8+2 phase power design. The CPU gets eight phases and the memory can rely on two phases for stable current delivery. As we already mentioned on the features page, this board comes with a digital power design, which is standard already with mid-range motherboards these days.



Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Z97X-UD3H. Officially supported are DDR3 3000(O.C.) / 2933(O.C.) / 2800(O.C.) / 2666(O.C.) / 2600(O.C.) / 2500(O.C.) / 2400(O.C.) / 2200(O.C.) / 2133(O.C.) / 2000(O.C.) / 1866(O.C.) / 1800(O.C.) / 1600 / 1333 MHz. There is engough space between the DIMM-slots and the CPU socket which means that you won't run into issues with large coolers even if you choose to install memory with big heatspreaders. Also supported are Xtreme Memory Profiles (XMP) in version 1.3.


PCH as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via passive heatsinks. On another note it is nice feeling, that this board is actually heavier than average, which is always a good indicator on how serious a manufacturer is about a certain product. Other than that we were surprised to see that the thermal pads on the heatsinks cover far more than just the VRM ICs.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Layout
Page 2 - Specs and Delivery	Page 5 - Connectors and I/O
Page 3 - Features	Page 6 - Conclusion