Gigabyte B75M-D3H B75 Motherboard Preview

Taking a quick look at the expansion bays that this board has, we find a PCI-Express x16 lane at the top, which operates at x16 speeds. Below this are two legacy PCI slots for older generation expansion cards, and a further x16 slot sits at the bottom, though only runs at x4 speeds. It is worth noting that while most users of this board won’t bother, CrossFireX is supported for two graphics cards through the x16 sized slots.

Out of this shot, there is a USB 3.0 native header, towards the ATX 24-pin connector, whereas the bottom of the board houses the other relevant connectors, including front panel LED and buttons header, USB 2.0, TPM, LPT, COM, SPDIF and front panel audio, making it convenient that all of them are bunched together, as sometimes we find the audio headers further up the board.

As we said earlier, around the CPU socket, things are quite bare and no heatsinks or other variants of cooling are present. The only cooling on this board is situated next to the SATA connectors and is a fairly standard, low-profile affair. It utilises a grey grated style but seems to match in with the rest of the board nicely due to it’s slim, short design.

With regards to the SATA ports, we find a total of six, and the colour coding may be a bit confusing for novicer users, as five of the six ports run at SATA 3GB/s (four blue and top white), whereas the bottom white SATA port operates at SATA III 6Gb/s speeds. It’s also worth telling you that if you are expecting RAID, think again as this board has no support for RAID of any kind I’m afraid.

Finally moving around to the rear I/O, we find two USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 mouse and keyboard combo port, VGA, single-link DVI and HDMI for your display outputs, two USB 3.0 ports, a further two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Lan and 7.1 channel audio. A nicely laid out and feature-rich package for a board of this nature in all honesty.