Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard – packs a punch at £80

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard3. Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard (Super High Res Gallery)4. Bios and Overclocking5. Testing Methodology6. Synthetic: PCMark 77. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage8. Synthetic: 3DMark 119. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Synthetic: HQV Benchmark 2.011. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 201112. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit13. Synthetic: SSD Performance14. Real World: 3D Rendering15. Real World: Media Encoding16. Real World: HandBrake 9.517. Gaming: F1 201118. Gaming: Alien V Predator19. Gaming: Dirt Showdown20. Gaming: Max Payne 321. Closing Thoughts22. View All Pages

At the beginning of May we reviewed the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H which delivered great performance at a modest price point around £160. Today we are looking at the budget GA-Z77-D3H which retails in the UK for only £80.

At half the price is this useless for the overclockers on a tight budget, or can it be pushed past 4ghz? What about 4.5ghz? We partner the board up with a Core i7 3770k and a Thermaltake Frio Extreme cooler.

Gigabyte have released a series of quality products this year and they are fighting hard against the competition for Z77 market share. When they told us that they had a high quality board capable of serious overclocks at only £80, we remained skeptical. We should expect some compromises at this price point, but would the power delivery be weak, resulting in a board only good at reference clocks?

The Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H incorporates their proprietary 3D Power system: Digital Voltage, Frequency and Phase Control. We have seen this in operation before with their UD5H board and it proved rock solid, so we hope it will be up to scratch with this budget board. GIGABYTE's 3D Power features precise Auto Voltage Compensation to deliver a steady flow of power to the system, no matter the loading.

This board also ships with their 3D BIOS which strips out all the complex settings for inexperienced users, who just want to tweak the board without having to learn a variety of settings. For added peace of mind, the board also ships with a dual UEFI bios configuration for fallback in case of hardware failure.

The Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard ships in a plain, yet attractive white box with the product name in the middle, alongside a visual representation of the 3D Bios. ‘3D' is the primary focus for Gigabyte.

Our bundle didn't look like a fresh new sample from the retail channel, as it had a single black SATA cable laying loose on the board itself above. Underneath was a manual, reference/guidebook, software disc, two other Sata cables, a Gigabyte sticker and a backplate.

The Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H isn't going to win any awards for appearance, built around a bright blue PCB with a single, small heatsink positioned around the CPU socket for VRM cooling. It is ATX sized, measuring 305mm x 244 mm.

The Gigabyte Z77X-US5H motherboard has several, very large heatsinks cooling all the VRM's, however due to the lower price, the GA77 D3H has to cut a few corners. Hopefully it won't affect the overclocking performance too badly. We look at this later in the review.

This board has only a 4 pin CPU power connector, unlike the 8 pin version found on the Gigabyte Z77X-US5H. Thankfully, there are two 4 pin fan headers here for dual fan CPU coolers.

There are four memory slots, dual channel, coloured blue and white. It can support up to 32GB of non ECC DDR3 memory. The listed speeds are 2400 (OC), 1600/1333/1066.

The GA-Z77-D3H has six SATA connectors. The light blue coloured ports mounted vertically to the board are all SATA 3 GB/s rated and are controlled by the Intel Z77 chipset. The two white ports mounted horizontally to the board are SATA 6 GB/s rated and are also controlled by the Intel Z77 chipset. The Intel Z77 chipset supports Raid 0, Raid 1, Raid 5 and Raid 10 configurations.

The motherboard is passively cooled.

The GA-Z77-D3H has a single slot for an mSATA Solid State Drive, which is controlled by the Z77 chipset. This is SATA 3GB/s rated. If a drive is connected here then the SATA 2 5 connector will be unavailable.

The top PCI Express x16 slot runs at x16 times when used in single mode. The second PCI Express x16 slot operates at x4. It shares bandwidth with the PCIEX1_2/3 slots. There are also 3 PCI Express x1 slots and 2 PCI slots.

Back Panel connectors include:

1. 1 x PS/2 keyboard/mouse port
2. 1 x D-Sub port
3. 1 x DVI-D port
4. 1 x HDMI port
5. 4 x USB 3.0/2.0 ports
6. 4 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
7. 1 x RJ-45 port
8. 1 x optical S/PDIF Out connector
9. 5 x audio jacks (Center/Subwoofer Speaker Out, Rear Speaker Out, Side Speaker Out, Line In/Mic In, Line Out)

Along the bottom of the PCB is an Audio connector, another 4 pin fan header and 3 USB headers. The front panel panel is at the far right.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

The Gigabyte Bios is very cleanly laid out and by default offers a range of settings for inexperienced users, in easy to understand pages.

Gigabyte are attempting to attract users into tweaking the settings, however we always prefer the advanced options, which we use for all the reviews.

When the board was shipped to us, it had the older F12 bios installed, which was two revisions behind the current version. We updated via the Q-Flash tool, which only takes a couple of minutes. The GA-Z77-D3H sets the Core i7 3770k aggressively to a 3.9ghz turbo in all core states, like the ASUS boards we tested previously.

The system defaulted our Corsair 2,400mhz to 1333mhz which is a fairly standard default configuration to ensure a safe post.

The GA-Z77-D3H seems to have most, if not all of the power and phase control settings found on the more expensive Z77X-UD5H.

The BIOS Features panel has settings to configure the boot drive priority, which is one of the first options you need to change if you have multiple hard drives.

The Peripherals panel allows various ports and controllers to be enabled and disabled.

The Power Management panel controls all the sleep and resume settings. The last Save and Exit panel has the usual save and load optimised settings, but it also has an option for multiple profiles, such as when overclocking.

We didn't waste anytime playing with lower clock settings and just cranked the Core i7 3770k to 4.7ghz. This required a voltage of 1.28 for stability. The memory was also solid at 2,400mhz via the built in XMP Profile 1 setting – we had to increase voltage to 1.65V.

Achieving complete stability at the higher overclock settings may require a little tweaking within the Advanced Voltage Settings/3D Power control. We adjusted the PWM Phase Control to eXm performance, with a fast vcore voltage response and the Loadline calibration set to high.

We managed to push the CPU frequency to 4,800mhz, but this required a 3770k voltage setting of 1.35v and we would need more extreme liquid or phase cooling to use this 24/7. We backed down to 4.7ghz again, although we are positive that this motherboard can hit close to 5ghz if you have the right cooling. We were expecting some issues getting stability past 4.6ghz, but were pleasantly surprised.

The GA-Z77-D3H isn't heavily populated with heatsinks so we would recommend a high airflow case, if you plan on overclocking with voltage tweaks.

System validation is available over here.

We have reviewed many Z77 motherboards since the platform launched and today we want to focus on performance in an overclocked state @ 4.7ghz. We will compare against a variety of processors and systems we have reviewed in recent months.

If you are interested in analysing the onboard graphics performance of Intel’s HD4000 built into the Core i7 3770k, then read this review.

Processor: Intel Core i7 3770k
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio Extreme
Memory: Corsair GTX8 2,400mhz (10-12-11-30)

Graphics Card: AMD HD7870
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W.
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive.
Chassis: Cooler Master Cosmos 2.
Monitors: Dell U3011, 3x Ilyama ProLite E2472HDD.
Boot Drive: Kingston SSDNow V+200 90GB.
Storage Drive: Patriot 240GB Wildfire.

Processor: Intel Core i7 3930K
Motherboard: Asus P9X79 WS WorkStation
Cooler: Corsair H100
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator GT8 2400mhz memory
Graphics Card: AMD HD7770 CrossfireX
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Cooler Master Cosmos 2
Boot Drive: Crucial C300 128GB SSD
Secondary Drive: Patriot 240GB Pyro SE

Intel i7 3960X EE
Motherboard: Asus Rampage IV Extreme
Cooler: Antec H20 920
Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator GT 2400mhz memory
Power Supply: Enermax Platimax 1200W
Optical Drive: Asus BluRay Drive
Chassis: Lian Li PC-A77FR Aluminium Red Full Tower Case
Boot Drive: Patriot WildFire 120GB
Secondary Drive: 1TB Samsung

Intel i7 3820
Motherboard: ASRock Extreme4-M
Cooler: Intel reference cooler
Memory: 8GB Corsair GTX8 @ 2133mhz
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Chassis: Lian Li PC60
Boot Drive: Crucial C300
Secondary Drive: Patriot Pyro SE 240GB

AMD FX 8150 Black Edition
Processor: AMD FX 8150 Black Edition
Motherboard: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Memory: G-SKill Ripjaws 1600mhz 8GB (2x 4GB)
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Chassis: SilverStone Raven 3
Boot Drive: Intel 40GB SSD
Secondary Drive: Patriot 120GB WildFire

Intel Core i7 990X
Processor: Intel Core i7 990x
Cooler: Corsair H100
Motherboard: Gigabyte G1 Assassin
Memory: Kingston HyperX 6GB
Drives: Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Chassis: Antec Twelve Hundred

Intel Core i7 2700k
Processor: Intel Core i7 2700k
Cooling: ThermalTake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 Z68 Motherboard
Chassis: Silverstone Raven 3.
Power Supply: Corsair 850W.
Memory: Corsair 1600mhz memory
Storage: Intel 80GB SSD (boot) / Patriot Wildfire 120GB SSD.

Intel Core i7 2600k
Processor: Intel Core i7 2600k
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen 3
Cooler: Intel XTS-100H
Memory: ADATA 1600mhz DDR3 8GB (2x4GB)
Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower 850W
Boot Drive: Intel 510 SSD 250GB

Intel Core i5 2500k
Processor: Intel Core i7 2500k
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 Z68 Motherboard
Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.2 CPU Cooler
Memory: Corsair 1600mhz memory 8GB (2x4GB)
Power Supply: Corsair 850W.
Boot Drive: Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD.

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
Motherboard: Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7
Cooler: Noctua NH D14
Memory: G-SKill Ripjaws 1600mhz 8GB (2x 4GB)
Power Supply: ADATA 1200W
Chassis: SilverStone Raven 3
Boot Drive: Intel 40GB SSD
Secondary Drive: Patriot 120GB WildFire

Gaming System Comparison System:
Processor: Core i7 970 @ 3.9ghz
Graphics: Asus GTX680
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)

Some game descriptions are edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.

PCMark 7 includes 7 PC tests for Windows 7, combining more than 25 individual workloads covering storage, computation, image and video manipulation, web browsing and gaming. Specifically designed to cover the full range of PC hardware from netbooks and tablets to notebooks and desktops, PCMark 7 offers complete PC performance testing for Windows 7 for home and business use.

The system at 4.7ghz scores almost 6,000 points, which is a very good achievement. The 2,400mhz memory and fast Solid State drive help balance the performance score.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

The overclocked Core i7 3770k delivers a very good score of 33,472 points. The HD7870 scores 25,271 points, which lowers the overall score to 26,920 points.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

Again, the overclocked Core i7 3770k boosts the overall score to 6754 points, which is impressive.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

When paired with the reference HD7870, the system averages 66.3 frames per second.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here

	AMD HD7870
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	5
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	7
Total	196

A score of 196 points is class leading right now, the ideal solution for high definition media playback on a big screen.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

At 4.7ghz, the Core i7 3770k is a strong performer, hitting the top position on the graphs. In dual channel mode, with 2 sticks of memory, even at 2,400mhz, the Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H falls slightly behind the Core i7 990X EE tri channel system @ 2,133mhz.

CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.

A great score at 4.7ghz, making this system ideal for heavy duty rendering environments. Obviously the 3960X Extreme Edition is faster, but it has two extra physical cores.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

Strangely, the SSD performance wasn't quite as good as we would have expected, with sequential read speeds around 150MB/s lower than the UD5H motherboard we reviewed at the start of May. We reinstalled the operating system and all drivers to confirm, but this was the best we could get from the Patriot Wildfire 240GB drive. It could possibly be a driver glitch on some level, but we were unable to resolve the performance drop before going to publication.

Atto Disk Benchmark mirrors the results above, with a 420 MB/s peak from sequential write, and 350 MB/s peak from sequential read. Not really noticeable in the real world, but slightly worse than the Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H results from the SATA 6Gbps ports.

V2011 is the first release of 3DStudio Max to fully support the Windows 7 operating system. This is a professional level tool that many people use for work purposes and our test will show any possible differences between board design today.

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011 software offers compelling new techniques to help bring designs to life by aggregating data, iterating ideas, and presenting the results.

Streamlined, more intelligent data exchange workflows and innovative new modeling and visualization tools help significantly increase designers’ creativity and productivity, enabling them to better explore, validate, and communicate the stories behind their designs.

Major new features:

• Slate: A node based material editor.
• Quicksilver: Hardware renderer with multithreaded rendering engine that utilizes both CPU and GPU.
• Extended Graphite Modeling Toolset
• 3ds Max Composite: A HDRI-capable compositor based on Autodesk Toxik.
• Viewport Canvas toolset for 3D and 2D texture painting directly in the viewport
• Object Painting: use 3D geometry as ‘brushes’ on other geometry
• Character Animation Toolkit (CAT): now integrated as part of the base package
• Autodesk Material Library: Over 1200 new photometrically accurate shaders
• Additional file format support: includes native support for Sketchup, Inventor
• FBX file linking
• Save to Previous Release (2010)

We created a new 8200×3200 scene and recorded the time for the hardware to finalise the render.

These results are strong and enhanced by the 2,400mhz Corsair memory installed in the Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard.

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

For testing today we are enabling graphics acceleration encoding.

A final time of 6 minutes and 48 seconds is one of the fastest times we have achieved to date, thanks to the hardware acceleration from the HD7870 graphics card. That said, Media Espresso does not use 100% of all the cores, so therefore the results above don’t tie in accurately with some of the other software today. By comparison a Quad core Intel ATOM powered system can take 1 hour and 15 minute to complete the same task.

Handbrake is a fantastic free program which we wanted to include to confirm findings with Media Espresso, earlier in the review. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

We used the latest V 0.9.5 for testing today across all platforms. We encoded an DVD.MPG file.

The system takes 4 minutes and 50 seconds to complete the task, which is around 4 seconds faster than the Core i7 2600k clocked at 4.8ghz.

F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid.

The system maintains a smooth frame rate at these settings, averaging 68 frames per second and never dropping below 60 frames per second.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparable throughout reviews.

This is a demanding Direct X 11 title, but the system maintains a 74 frames per second average, only dropping below 50 frames per second a few times.

Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.

We enabled Ultra image quality settings at 1080p with 8 times anti aliasing, as detailed above.

The system managed to maintain smooth frame rates, although it did drop under 30 frames per second a couple of times. We would suggest lowering the anti aliasing to 4x to improve the minimum frames a little.

Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter in which the player assumes the role of its titular character, Max Payne. Max Payne 3 features a similar over-the-shoulder camera as its predecessors, with the addition of a cover mechanic, while also retaining much of the same run-and-gun style of gameplay. Max Payne 3 also marks the return of bullet-time in action sequences, for which the franchise is notable.

In bullet-time it is possible to see every bullet strike an enemy in detail. New to the series is a “Last Stand” mechanic, which gives the player a grace period after losing all health during which time the player may kill the enemy that wounded them in order to continue playing, however this mechanic is only usable if the player has one or more bottles of painkillers in their possession.

We enabled a mixture of high and very high settings at 1080p with 2XMSAA and 16x AF.

No problems powering through the engine at these settings, averaging a very smooth 49 frames per second.

I was extremely impressed with the Gigabyte Z77X-US5H last month, and was intrigued when Gigabyte offered me the GA-Z77-D3H for review, especially when they told me it was being sold for £80, or half the price of its bigger brother.

Obviously there have been compromises to meet such an aggressive price point … firstly it doesn't have SLI support and when running in Crossfire the user will be limited to x4 PCI E bandwidth. The PCB isn't heavily populated with high grade heatsinks either so we would recommend a case with decent air flow, especially when running overclocked.

For those people who want a no frills, Ivy Bridge system build with a single graphics card then the GA-Z77-D3H delivers mega performance for little money. We overclocked our Core i7 3770k to 4.7ghz with a Thermaltake Frio Extreme Cooler, and temperatures never rose past 68c under load. 4.8ghz was possible, and potentially more, if you are using a high end liquid cooler.

Gigabyte's strategy is enticing, they have removed as much from the board to meet the price point, but haven't compromised on overclocking capability. The GA-Z77-D3H achieved the same overclock as any of the high end motherboards we have in our labs and supported the high grade Corsair 2,400mhz memory without a single problem.

As the foundation for an extremely low cost Ivy Bridge system this is probably the best choice on the market. If you only need two SATA 6Gbps ports, have no desire to run Crossfire or SLI configurations then this one of the best deals you can get right now.

There is no doubt that this budget board is an overclocking monster able to hit the same heights as competing boards at twice the cost. Just be sure to flow some cool air over the components if you crank it high.

You can pick it up from OCUK for £79.99 inc vat

Pros:

• Only £80.
• Overclocks to the same level as many high end boards.
• Rock stable.
• Good bios.
• Did we say, only £80 ?

Cons:

• Won't win any beauty awards.
• only two SATA 6Gbps ports.
• no SLI.
• Crossfire will drop to x4 bandwidth.
• needs air flow in high overclock situations.

Kitguru says: If you have no interest in many of the ‘frills' then the Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H concentrates on delivering a rock solid overclocking experience.

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