Gigabyte Intel Z77 LGA 1155 AMD CrossFireX/NVIDIA SLI Dual LAN Dual UEFI BIOS ATX Motherboard GA-Z77X-UD5H
Pros: great motherboard! Works well as a windows of or a hackintosh! Loved that it has the ability to have so many. Upgrade! Also really nice that it has so many USB 3.0 ports! I have two 3tb hard drives and one 120gb SSD plugged in and the transfer speeds are amazing on sata 6gbs. Also I have the i7-3770k and over locking is so simple on it! I have my corsair h100i plugged on it and I get temperatures of 40 Celsius at 100% load at 4.5ghz! Going to go higher next and see what happens. Aiming for 5ghz, doubt ill get that. Anyway, it's a great mother board. My radon 7970 is plugged into the pci port and that also runs nicely. The bios for the mono is also great, the 3D feature is awesome and makes tweaking so much simpler! Highly recommend this to anyone wanting to build a new high performance computer!
Cons: wish it has more fan ports on the board itself. Only has 4 from what I know.
That's about the only thing I have against this product.
This is the heart of my gaming rig (NVIDIA GSX 670 Graphics card). Runs cool, never even a hint of a problem. Install was a snap. I especially like the abundance of USB & SATA ports, and the ESATA port, since I have about 10T of external storage for media.
Nice board. Had an issue on initial start. Fan would fire up on power supply for about a second and shut right off. Ended up pulling everything apart, started over, plugged everything back in and it runs like a dream.
Having had this board for a few days now paired with a 3770k all I can say is that it is one of my favorite motherboards. I enjoy the UEFI Bios (3d mode is kind of gimmicky though).
Overclocking is quite easy and it takes almost no effort to get 4.3ghz out of this thing.
Overall I am happy with it and if i could 'do it again' I would purchase this board again.
Great upgrade from the 875k I had previously paired with a Gigabyte P55A-UD3.
There are a few options for Z77 boards, in this price range its the Asus, MSI, or Gigabyte (this board). I bought the Asus board first and it was DOA, not being the kind to give second chances, I returned it and bought this board and it went in and worked flawlessly.
Pros:
Great features: SLI, Crossfire, Dual BIOS (actual chips, not some software implementation), Realtek ALC898, Dual Gigabit NICs
Standard Z77 features: PCI-E 3.0 (w/ Ivy Bridge CPU), Native chipset USB 3.0, Lucid Virtu MVP
Plenty of SATA ports (2 x SATA3, 4 x SATA2, and 2 x SATA3 on another chip, and 1 x eSATA)
EasySetup (for Intel Rapid Start, Smart Response, Smart Connect)
Cons:
Bios fan control could use some work (options are automatic and manual, manual only defines ramp slope, would be more useful IMO to set a target temperature)
EasyTune6 is a OS resource hog
Other thoughts:
For some reason I started getting a warning in Windows 7 about "Power surge on USB 3.0..." which is odd considering nothing was plugged into that USB 3.0 port. I disabled the offending port in Device Manager, and figure if it's not fixed in the next BIOS or before the warranty runs out, I'll RMA it.
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