GIGABYTE GA-Z77-HD4 (rev. 1.0) Pro Reviews

How much can $120 buy in a motherboard? If you want a simple single GPU system with a mild overclock, Gigabyte seem to have you covered. The Z77-HD4 is almost along the lines of a no-frills product: we have the base features of Z77 (overclocking, SATA 6 Gbps and USB 3.0), in a shortened board with additional PCIe, PCIe x1 and PCI ports as needed. Performance-wise, the Z77-HD4 performs as well as any other Z77 motherboard on the market in terms of actual CPU and gaming performance at stock. All the CPU benchmarks and gaming benchmarks were in the mix – the only point at which we could consider the HD4 was not too good was in some of the IO, particularly DPC Latency where no matter what options we tried, the motherboard still spiked up to 561 microseconds without ET6 loaded and 871 with. USB performance however was decent enough and while power consumption seemed a little high under dual GPU testing, idle power usage was good.

The Gigabyte Z77-HD4 is clearly targeted to the average user, coming only with the feature set provided by the chipset, such as two SATA-600 ports and four USB 3.0 ports. However, there are several smaller yet important features that set it apart from other entry-level motherboards. These include the use of four video connectors (VGA, DVI-D, HDMI, and DisplayPort), the presence of a second PCI Express x16 slot (even though it is 2.0 and works at x4), a digital voltage regulator circuit, the use of only solid capacitors, the presence of two BIOS chips, and three four-pin fan connectors for auxiliary fans, allowing you to use PWM fans (which can be programmed to change their speed by software). The only drawback of this motherboard, in our opinion, is the presence of only three audio jacks. So, if when installing a 5.1 analog speaker set, you will have to “kill” the “line in” and the “mic in” jacks. This should not be a problem if you use a USB headset, though.