Flagship, extreme performance and overclocking motherboards steal a lot of the spotlight, which is understandable, but the reality is that we often purchase our consumer based products from further down the range. The new Gigabyte’s Z97-HD3P is their latest entry-level socket LGA1150 motherboard for the Intel Z97 Express chipset and if you’re just after a reliable board for a day-to-day gaming and work PC, this could be a great option for you.
Priced at around $100 the board is certainly affordable, but it still comes packed full of features that make it a tempting option for any system builder; a 4-phase VRM for clean power delivery, four DDR3 DIMM slots, a single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, PCI 2.0 x16 (electrical x4), two PCIe 2.0 x1 and two legacy PCI.
There are six SATA 6Gb/s ports, one SATA Express port which draws from two 6 Gb/s ports, and an M.2 10 Gb/s slot; which overall may not be that impressive, but it’s more than enough for the majority of people. Other connectivity options include D-Sub, DVI, HDMI, 4 USB 3.0 ports on the back and two more from the header. There’s 8-channel Realtek ALC887 audio on-board; it’s also worth mentioning that the board features audio-grade electrolytic capacitors and PCB ground-layer isolation which should help improve the sound quality and reduce electrical noise.
This is a solid mid range board and if the performance is up to scratch, which I suspect it will be, this could be a very popular board for Gigabyte.
Thank you Gigabyte for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of Gigabyte.
In July last year, Netflix officially confirmed that it had ended the option for new…
The free-to-play MMO Albion Online is one of the best games to come out of…
Set the curve with the CORSAIR XENEON FLEX 45WQHD240 OLED Bendable UltraWide Gaming Display, built…
Say hello to the future of graphics, with the MSI GeForce RTX 4090 GAMING X…
This Scan Gamer RTX features the 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 graphics card featuring new…
The MAG series fights alongside gamers in pursuit of honor. With added military-inspired elements in…