Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H Motherboard
Overview Continued
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Next up on our journey is the south bridge. The south bridge of the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H is passively cooled by a healthy heatsink. Just to the upper right of the south bridge, you will see a SATA power connector. Gigabyte recommends in a dual GPU configuration that extra power be supplied to the PCI-E slots using a SATA power connector from the power supply. This will ensure that plenty of power is available for the GPUs.
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The Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H houses eight SATA ports. The two grey ports are controlled by the on board Marvell 88SE9172 controller and are SATA3 (6Gb/s) compliant. The Marvell chip supports RAID levels 1 and 0. The remaining black ports are controlled by the Intel Z87 chipset and are SATA3 (6Gb/s) compliant as well. The Intel chipset supports RAID 0,1,5 and 10.
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Down at the bottom of the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H are the connectors for the controls on the case. The power button, reset button, power and hard drive LEDs are marked as to where they plug in.
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The remainder of the front panel headers are just to the left of the control header. They include one USB 3.0, three USB 2.0, Com port, TPM, and front panel audio using either HD audio or AC97.
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The Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H has plenty of expansion slots; however, special attention needs to be paied to the PCI-E x16 slots. While there are three PCI-E x16 slots, only one runs at the full x16. The other two run at x8 and 4x. The Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H supports single and dual GPU configurations only, no tri-SLI here. There are a total of three PCI-E x1 slots and one standard PCI slot.
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The I/O panel of the Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H houses a plethora of connectors. The back I/O panel features one PS/2 port, DVI, VGA, optical S/PDIF, Display port and HDMI. Also present on the back panel are six USB 3.0 ports, two e-SATA ports, 10/100/1000 RJ45 LAN and 7.1-channel audio. The two e-SATA ports are controlled by the onboard Marvell chipset.
