A Closer Look
Everything is as it should be with plenty of options for mice, monitors, keyboards, and headphones. Pretty standard setup.
Though there’s not much to separate the z87x from the z77x on the surface, Gigabyte has done good work prepping for the Haswell series of processors. I hope I’m right in assuming that you at least skimmed the specifications page, and if you didn’t I won’t hold it against you, but if you did you probably noticed that this board is sold as a “ud4h” even though this actually has the Ultra-Durable 5 technology. We’ll just chalk that one up to the weird (at least to me) process of naming products. This is welcome news of course; much better than finding out it’s an older model.
With all these terms being thrown around, it can be a bit of a headache to keep track of it all. In short summary: the UD5 technology coupled with the physical improvements on capacitors, VRMs, and the doubling of power phasers from eight to sixteen makes the board cooler, quieter, more efficient, and it also gives more room to work with when you need to up the voltage.
BIOS
Something I can happily mention is that I encountered no serious issues playing around in the factory loaded BIOS. All features were easy to navigate through with no weird errors popping up when swapping hardware or tweaking settings.
The voltage settings were fairly clear cut; however, and this is more of a nitpick than anything, if you want to move past the stock 1.13 vCore you’ll have to mess with the slider a bit before you actually reach the target area. The default drop-down menu starts off at only .5 volts, and given that you have to scroll through every microvolt, it can take a little while using that method. There really weren’t any annoyances with tweaking the memory either; a simple once-over of the profile tab is enough to give a nice bump to the sticks (2666mhz in this case).
I should mention something that you’ll probably notice yourself if you pick up a board for yourself, and that’s the menu layout. It’s not bad per se, but not all features are pre-loaded. What I mean is you might have 10-15 options per section, but if you want more (Speedstep for instance) you’ll have to add them yourself by using one of the available profiles or editing the default section via a pop-up menu. You can always go to the traditional menu style if you’re more comfortable with that. Just know that the default menu style is quite a bit smoother.
Now, on to performance!
