GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD4H (rev. 1.0) Pro Reviews

We are quote fond of GIGABYTE's Z87X-UD4H. It offers strong performance, expansive storage connectivity options, good power consumption numbers, a worthwhile new BIOS mode, a nice mix of manual and automatic overclocking capabilities, and at $185 it also offers pretty good Bang for the Buck. Therefore, if you are in the market for a Z87 motherboard, the GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H should definitely be on your shortlist.

The Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H operated flawlessly throughout testing. Performance was comparable to the other boards; the feature set was strong, the BIOS options were plentiful, and everything ran perfectly even using the automated features for overclocking! The Turbo Boost Ratio was at a full 39, allowing the CPU to operate as it should at stock default settings. The board is very capable of fulfilling even extreme enthusiasts' needs or those learning to push the boundaries. At the same time it is able to work right away straight of the box, keeping things simple for novices, plus with automated features an overclock is as easy as selecting an option and restarting! Testing was done with the latest F7 BIOS as it gave me no problems. The F5 BIOS functioned perfectly except it wouldn't always change the memory multiplier. UEFI BIOS is quite a remarkable advancement compared to standard BIOS. Being able to customize is amazing; you can fine-tune things for faster access to settings you more frequently change. The only con I could really think of after everything is that the BIOS lacked scroll bars on pages that had more content that couldn't be seen without scrolling. Gigabyte updated this on the F7 drivers by changing the mouse icon to suggest that there is more content, but there is still no way to scroll other than by mouse wheel. This is a stretch; honestly there was nothing else I could think of. For what the board is, it is virtually perfect. There is always room to want more, but this board didn't leave me feeling like I was missing out on anything. If there are any features you want that aren't provided, there are higher end Gigabyte motherboards that have them, but for a strong general purpose board this is hard to beat. The only things a user could realistically miss are: IEEE 1394 headers and Wi-Fi. IEEE 1394 isn't nearly as common as USB and Wi-Fi is a premium feature (that is offered on higher end Gigabyte boards). The software worked almost perfectly; it required an update but after that it worked without any problems! The only bug I noticed was incorrect memory frequency being reported but that didn't affect performance. The board was completely stable; the only time I ever had a crash was when the pushing the CPU with too low of voltages!

The GIGABYTE Z87X-UD4H proved to be the best Z87 motherboard that we have experienced from GIGABYTE. The overall package is not as refined as some others in the market, but the motherboard’s build quality and design are very solid. This motherboard is selling in the $180 range. If you are a GIGABYTE fan this motherboard should be on our Haswell short list.

Gigabyte has made huge steps forward with the new 8 series boards and the performance tuning cannot be denied here. looking at the feature set they have alot going on from the dual USB 3.0 headers onboard, to the full display array of connectivity and much more. The performance of the board as you saw is very good and allows for much better overall performance at the same clocks even more so than some high end “Overclocker” centric models which makes me very excited to get some hands on time with the OC model of their 8 series. One thing we would have liked to have seen would be built in WiFi just because so many people are going wireless now. It seemed like more of their 7 series models had WiFi capability included. However, WiFi capability is a double edge sword, as it involves additional components and pushes the sale price up for the end user. The board’s price point is right in the sweet spot for most users where it’s not so high that it cannot be purchased, but also not so cheap as to be missing key features. We think Gigabyte pulls off a very nice price/performance balance here with amazing efficiency and excellent price positioning making this board poised to take a top spot in our rankings.