Introduction

Since we're roughly five months away from a massive influx of new motherboards via the Haswell platform, we're seeing companies promote the current crop of Z77 motherboards quite heavily at the moment. The latest motherboard to arrive comes from GIGABYTE and continues the line of strong Z77 based motherboards.

Recently we had a chance to look at the Z77X-UP7 which impressed us with strong features, good performance and a fantastic look. While not for everyone, the cheaper Z77X-UD5H could be a better option, as it won't bust the bank account open quite as much.

Today we look at an even cheaper option in the Z77X-UD4H. So what does the cheaper price tag bring to the table? Well, we can only find out by doing one thing and that's getting a closer look at the motherboard.

The first thing we need to do is look at the package and bundle before we move onto the actual board itself. We'll then head into the BIOS area to see what's going on before looking at our testbed, the overclocking side of things and finally of course the performance of the board at both stock speeds and overclocked speeds.

Package

Looking at the box it's not quite as full on as other more expensive boards with information as the Z77X-UP7 which opens up to reveal the board and a whole lot more. Looking above, though, you can see some of the main features are covered with a big push on the 3D Power and 3D BIOS features being mentioned on the front. You can also see that we've got PCIe Gen 3, Virtu MVP and SLI support.

Turning over to the back of the box you can see we get more detail on what exactly 3D Power and 3D BIOS brings to the table along with some detail on the Ultra Durable 4 side of things. As always we've got a fairly strong looking board, but until we get into the down and dirty, we won't know exactly what we're dealing with.

Being a cheaper UD4H motherboard means that the bundle side of things is a little lighter than other more expensive boards. Above you can see the manuals along with four SATA cables, SLI bridge and an I/O Panel to round everything off. Due to the nature of getting the board a little earlier before volume shipping, we didn't get a driver CD, but you will see this in the retail offerings on the street.