Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard – packs a punch at £80

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard3. Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard (Super High Res Gallery)4. Bios and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201112. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit13. Synthetic: SSD Performance14. Real World: 3D Rendering15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: HandBrake 9.517. Gaming: F1 201118. Gaming: Alien V Predator19. Gaming: Dirt Showdown20. Gaming: Max Payne 321. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

At the beginning of May we reviewed the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H which delivered great performance at a modest price point around £160. Today we are looking at the budget GA-Z77-D3H which retails in the UK for only £80.

At half the price is this useless for the overclockers on a tight budget, or can it be pushed past 4ghz? What about 4.5ghz? We partner the board up with a Core i7 3770k and a Thermaltake Frio Extreme cooler.

Gigabyte have released a series of quality products this year and they are fighting hard against the competition for Z77 market share. When they told us that they had a high quality board capable of serious overclocks at only £80, we remained skeptical. We should expect some compromises at this price point, but would the power delivery be weak, resulting in a board only good at reference clocks?

The Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H incorporates their proprietary 3D Power system: Digital Voltage, Frequency and Phase Control. We have seen this in operation before with their UD5H board and it proved rock solid, so we hope it will be up to scratch with this budget board. GIGABYTE's 3D Power features precise Auto Voltage Compensation to deliver a steady flow of power to the system, no matter the loading.

This board also ships with their 3D BIOS which strips out all the complex settings for inexperienced users, who just want to tweak the board without having to learn a variety of settings. For added peace of mind, the board also ships with a dual UEFI bios configuration for fallback in case of hardware failure.

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