Gigabyte Z77-HD4 Review

Gigabyte Z77-HD4 Conclusion

How much can $120 buy in a motherboard?  If you want a simple single GPU system with a mild overclock, Gigabyte seem to have you covered.  The Z77-HD4 is almost along the lines of a no-frills product: we have the base features of Z77 (overclocking, SATA 6 Gbps and USB 3.0), in a shortened board with additional PCIe, PCIe x1 and PCI ports as needed.

Performance-wise, the Z77-HD4 performs as well as any other Z77 motherboard on the market in terms of actual CPU and gaming performance at stock.  All the CPU benchmarks and gaming benchmarks were in the mix – the only point at which we could consider the HD4 was not too good was in some of the IO, particularly DPC Latency where no matter what options we tried, the motherboard still spiked up to 561 microseconds without ET6 loaded and 871 with.  USB performance however was decent enough and while power consumption seemed a little high under dual GPU testing, idle power usage was good.

The Z77-HD4 did well in our overclocking suite surpassing expectations.  In terms of our bad CPU, it matched other boards we have reviewed recently, and although the voltages had to be increased more than I would like the temperatures were comparatively low compared to our other CPUs.  Of course while the board may overclock like some of the big boys, an issue comes along with VRM temperatures at those high overclocks – with fewer phases and smaller heatsinks, you may find the hardware throttles earlier than some of the more substantial designs.

What the HD4 lacks most of all is functionality.  Due to the price point we have no extra controllers on board, SATA ports sticking out of the motherboard and an x16 + x4 full length PCIe allocation which does not lend itself to multi-GPU gaming.  However if one of the selling points of this motherboard is the inclusion of all four video outputs at the low price, then one could conceivably argue that this board should not be paired with a discrete GPU and more like a good RAID card or Sound card, or one should venture forth with Virtu MVP to get the best responsiveness.

Going up the Gigabyte range, the UD3H is currently on sale for $140, and offers a bit more in styling, eSATA ports, an mSATA port, and up to 3-way CrossFire with an x8/x8 + x4 PCIe lane setup.  The in-box package also includes an SLI bridge as a point of differentiation.

For the future, I have had requests to have a look at some of these cheaper products, as well as B- and Q- series when time allows.  Unlike some of the bigger boards that flesh out the $150+ range, these lower models can sometimes only differ in one feature, but be based on the same PCB design.  So if you have any specific models, please let me know at ian@anandtech.com.