Gigabyte GA-Z270M D3H Motherboard Review

The Box and Packaging

Nothing special about the packaging and contents. It’s rather bland! You get an instruction manual, I/O backplate, the motherboard itself and only ONE (yes 1) SATA data cable. 

The motherboard itself …

The Gigabyte GA-Z270M D3H is a mATX motherboard and measures only 24.4cm x 22.5cm in dimensions. It should fit in a majority of ATX cases. 

Interestingly, the motherboard comes with a M.2 connector for NVMe storage or Intel’s Octane memory. Sadly, there is no DualBIOS or diagnostic LEDs. 

It’s not a gaming motherboard, so don’t expect too much. There’s no guard/protector for the PCIE or memory slots. The motherboard offers multi-GPU support, but only AMD Radeon Crossfire. Nvidia SLI is not supported.

A Closer Look

There are 6 x SATA and 3 SATA Express ports, which is more than enough for most users. On closer examination, you’ll notice there are 2 standard PCI slots. Wow, I haven’t seen them for a while. It’s good to have, if you still have some legacy PCI cards that you want to use. 

For connectivity, the motherboard offers PS/2 keyboard or mouse, a total of 6 x USB ports, USB-C port, Gigabit LAN and an array of connectors for HD audio. For video outputs, you’re fully covered … you’ve got VGA, DVI and HDMI.

What’s really odd about this motherboard is that you get load of headers for legacy connectors such as COM port and Parallel port. There’s even one for TPM.

The ambient LED trace path lighting can be found on the bottom left hand corner of the motherboard, where the audio controller is situated. A total of 4 x DDR4 DIMM slots allow a maximum of 64GB of memory to be installed (upto DDR4 3866+ OC).