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Gigabyte H170-HD3 (LGA 1151) Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Gigabyte H170-HD3 currently has a retail price of £80.36 in the UK and €109.96 from respected French store, LDLC.com. Unfortunately, I cannot find the motherboard from any USA stockist but it’s a fairly new product and should be available within the next few weeks. At just under £80, the H170-HD3 is similarly priced to the ASUS H170-PLUS D3 but has the advantage of supporting DDR4 memory up to 2133MHz instead of lower speed DDR3 and DDR3L.

Overview

Even though Intel’s H170 chipset is designed for customers on a tight budget, it still manages to offer an impressive range of features and doesn’t contain too many concessions compared to the enthusiast Z170 platform. This particular motherboard, the Gigabyte H170-HD3 managed to attain great results in 3D benchmarks and emphasizes how powerful a single card solution on H170 can be. Furthermore, most game engines are GPU bound and even at stock settings, the i7-6700K is an absolute powerhouse. Furthermore, the Z170’s overclocking headroom doesn’t dramatically improve performance in games.

The motherboard’s BIOS is surprisingly detailed considering the lack of overclocking ability and extremely easy to navigate. It’s possible to manually tweak a number of key settings including DRAM frequency and CPU core voltage. Although you cannot increase the CPU multiplier per core beyond 42 or set the memory above 2133MHz. Once again, unless you’re dealing with synthetic benchmarks, this doesn’t have a major effect in rudimentary tasks or gaming. As a result, H170’s restrictions are far from a deal breaker and I honestly believe the gaming audience needs to consider this chipset as a viable alternative to Z170. Realistically, many consumers are uncomfortable with the overclocking process and worried about damaging their hardware. Therefore, if there are no significant performance drops from Z170, why spend the extra?

On another note, the H170-HD3 adopts a smaller profile than conventional ATX motherboards which makes the final design look quite sleek. I’m also quite partial to the sophisticated black colour scheme and gold on the heatsinks. Additionally, the white crossed design and yellow audio path make the motherboard look more expensive than it actually is. In terms of the overall layout, there’s a good array of connectors including M.2, SATA Express and traditional SATA 6Gb/s ports. There are also two USB 3.0 front panel headers, a clearly labelled CPU header and 3 adeptly placed system fan headers. The motherboard supports a Crossfire graphics card configuration and features two older PCI slots. This is a sensible decision given the retail price and target market because on the budget end, people often like to use their existing, older hardware.

In terms of benchmarks, the motherboard performed exceptionally well except for synthetics which showed the theoretical limitations of 2133MHz memory. I was pretty bemused by the UDP networking results which left me feeling pretty disappointed. On the other hand, this could be down to a strange software bug in Windows or perhaps my home network encountered a surge in background traffic. Whatever the case, it’s not ideal, but it shouldn’t really impact on typical networking tasks. The motherboard did quite well in storage benchmarks and was only a slight amount off the higher tiered positions. This is well within a margin of error and showcases the type of speeds possible on an H170 product.

Overall, the H170-HD3 is a fantastic value-for-money proposition and includes loads of premium features, such as Dual BIOS, fast storage options, and excellent audio. The use of 5K capacitors and a reliable VRM design evokes a sense of confidence in the motherboard’s longevity. In the next few weeks, we will be reviewing various other H170 motherboards and it will be interesting to see the compare the results. Although, I have to admit the H170-HD3 is a superb package which will be frightfully difficult to beat!

Pros