Gigabyte Z87-D3HP review

The Gigabyte Z87-D3HP is an ATX motherboard that caters for Intel’s 4th-generation “Haswell” Core processors. As implied by its name, the Z87-D3HP uses the Z87 chipset, the successor to the 3rd-generation Z77 chipset.

The Z87 provides up to six SATA3 ports, which means every drive can potentially benefit from the fastest SATA speeds currently possible. It also means you no longer have to juggle a limited number of SATA connections between drives, you can just plug in a new drive and be confident that its capable of running at the best speed.

The Z87 also provides a greater number of USB3 ports, with the Z87-D3HP providing no less than six on its back panel and a further four through the use of the board’s USB3 headers. Sadly, Gigabyte doesn’t include USB3 brackets with the board, which means you’ll have to use your case’s USB3 brackets or buy your own to make use of the headers. The Z87-D3HP also provides two USB2 ports on its back panel and two USB2 headers.

Other connections include a legacy PS2 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, an optical S/PDIF port and 5 analogue audio ports for surround sound. The Z87-D3HPs also has HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs, and you can make use of all of them, as the Z87 chipset lets you output video to three monitors at once.

Expansion ports include two PCI-E x16 slots, one of which runs at x4, two PCI-E x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots. The board also supports CrossFire, should you be lucky enough to have two compatible AMD graphics cards. This is a pretty good selection of expansion ports, but we think it would best suit those with a single graphics card.

We were impressed with the Z87-D3HP’s performance compared to Intel’s “reference” DZ87KLT-75K motherboard. When used with a Core i7-4770K, 4GB of Corsair XMS3 RAM running at 1600MHz and a Crucial M4 SSD, the Intel board scored 109 overall in our benchmark tests. The Gigabyte board scored 111 overall with the same setup. That’s a small increase in overall scores, but the gap between the two boards widened in the Z87-D3HP’s favour the higher we overclocked the processor. With a 4.6GHz CPU overclock applied, the Intel board scored 125 overall, while the Z87-D3HP scored 132.

Testing with the Best Buy winning Intel Core i5-4670K, we saw equally as impressive benchmark results, with an overall score of 112.

Despite its reasonable price, the Gigabyte Z87-D3HP still has a good selection of expansion inside and display and USB3 connectors on the outside. If you want a fairly inexpensive board on which to base your 4th-generation Intel Core system then this is a good choice.