Gigabyte Z77MX-D3H Review

Up Close

As always the Gigabyte Z77MX-D3H might be a smaller sized motherboard but you wouldn't think so to look at the packaging. It's comes in the same crisp white box that we saw the UD5 arrive in, with the 3D Power and 3D BIOS the main focus points. Accessories are limited as one would expect, with the standard manual, drivers, SATA cables, IO shield and SLI bridge.

Whereas the UD5 had blue heatsinks but was black everywhere else, the D3H is more akin to the standard Gigabyte theme, with a blue PCB and light blue and white sockets.  

Despite its svelte size, there is still a lot of connectivity options on the D3H.  Thankfully unlike a lot of mATX motherboards with their reduced fan headers, you aren't required to stretch the fans across the board if you have a twin tower CPU cooler. Instead you have two fan points just above the main PCI Express slot.

The chipset heatsink is very small, and because of the small footprint of the D3H it ends up sitting with about 60% of it below the GPU, so good case airflow is a must. It gets quite toasty.

With the mATX format you usually find a reduction in the power circuitry and the D3H is no exception with the north side of the CPU socket looking very sparse indeed. There is only a 4pin ATX power too, so that might limit our overclock a little. The placement of the front-panel USB 3.0 extension makes a lot of sense. Gigabyte have certainly made the most of the limited real estate.

The two white SATA connectors are the 6Gb/s ones, with the light blue supplying the 3Gb/s throughput. Round the back we have VGA, DVI and HDMI for your displays, with 2 USB 3.0 ports, LAN, audio and PS2, alongside the 6 standard USB ports.