The Board - Layout

With the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H board out of its anti-static bag, I forgot about the the lack of accessories until I looked at these pictures again. I was impressed with what I saw as the screws attaching the heatsinks to the board clearly indicate that there is more than on a normal "entry" board here.


The socket area of the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H is nice and open, with all-black solid capacitors around the socket nearly disappearing into the board's surface. The back of the board has lots of space for the backplate of an aftermarket cooler.


There are seven slots for you to stick your goodies into, with a rather unique arrangement. The first and second PCIe x16 slots are driven by the CPU you install. These two slots share the CPU's PCIe x16 electrical link equally between them when both are populated. The PCIe x1 slots and the bottom PCIe x16 slot are all driven by the Intel Z87 PCH, though using the x4 electrical link in the lower PCIe x16 slot will deactivate the second and third PCIe x1 slots. There is also a PCI slot for those that prefer it for audio cards or other legacy devices. The quartet of DIMM slots each support 8 GB DIMMs of up to 3000 MHz, or potentially more with some hard overclocking. I ran 3200 MHz myself pretty easily, but that is beyond what the board "officially" supports.


The lower edge has USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 headers, and audio, fan, TPM, COM, and front panel connections, which covers anything ANYONE is ever going to need there. Speaking of fan headers, there are six fan headers on the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H. Five of them are 4-pin PWM and the sixth is a 3-pin below the SATA ports on the right side of the board. There are two fan headers for the CPU socket—one is white and the other black. The white header was specifically designed for use with those AIO coolers that are pretty popular right now, since they require power for both pump and fan. Plug the pump into the white header and the fan into the black header, but make sure to set the white header to always run at 100% in the BIOS, independent of the other CPU fan header, and you will get the best possible cooling from your aftermarket AIO watercooler without having to mess with adapters and additional plugs.


Most of the Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H's backplate is taken up by video connections and USB 3.0 ports, but the usual analogue and digital audio ports and a PS/2 port are also here, and two eSATA and one LAN port. The internal SATA ports come in two colors, black and gray. The black ports connect to the Intel Z87 PCH offering RAID capabilities over a SATA 6 Gb/s connection to each port. The gray ports are connected to a Marvell controller which also powers the eSATA ports on the backplate, so you can use either of those eSATA ports or the internal gray ports but not both at the same time.