Final thoughts and rating
The Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard, priced at £150, sits on the premium side of the market, because stripped-down models are available for almost half the money, including the firm's own (and reviewed) Z77-D3H. Spending significantly more buys you a board that's geared towards providing greater features and specific focus on overclocking.
Looking the business and adding to Intel's SATA and USB repertoire, while including a bunch of useful enthusiast-orientated bells and whistles into the mix, we come away with the feeling that Gigabyte has created a solid, if not spectacular, motherboard. The only manifest changes we'd make rest with a little component repositioning and better fan-control support in the BIOS. In all other areas, however, the UD5H feels like a premium board.
Is it worth buying, then? We think that you really need to take advantage of extensive SATA, USB 3.0 and LAN support for it to be of genuine benefit to the enthusiast, because it performs similarly to a reference board at stock speeds. The Intel Z77 motherboard market has moved to a state where a £100 board is perfectly adequate for 95 per cent of users, so spending more, significantly so, requires a healthy return on investment: Gigabyte's ROI is reasonable. However, checking other manufacturers' offerings at this price point on a feature-to-feature count, Gigabyte's is above average.
Bottom line: consider the £150 Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H motherboard if you plan to run a full-on, feature-rich PC rig. There's plenty of good here, but, given what's already out there in Z77 land, reducing the price by £20 or so certainly would help: the el-cheapo boards limit just how much manufacturers can charge for premium motherboards.
The Good
Looks great
Lots of SATA3 and USB 3.0
Great BIOS, for the most part
Flexible video outputs
The Bad
£150 is steep for a Z77 board
Fan control could, and should, be better
HEXUS Rating
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
HEXUS Where2Buy
The reviewed motherboard is available here.
HEXUS Right2Reply
At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
