Intel H67 Motherboard Roundup - Four of a Kind

Gigabyte GA-H67A-UD3H

Gigabyte GA-H67A-UD3H

Gigabyte is the other brand to have sent us a full ATX board for this H67 roundup. As its model name implies, the UD3H is firmly in mainstream territory, with extras limited mostly to the presence of Gigabyte's proprietary technologies, like Ultra Durable 3. Thanks to its form factor, there's an attempt at multi-GPU support in the form of AMD's CrossFireX, but like the ASUS P8H67-V, the limited bandwidth means that the second PCIe x16 slot gets only 4 lanes in CrossFireX and most serious enthusiasts will not contemplate such a configuration.

In any case, the H67 chipset is not exactly targeted at such users. Besides CrossFireX, this board comes with the standard SATA port configuration from the chipset - three SATA 3Gbps (with a fourth featured as an eSATA connection on the rear I/O) and two SATA 6Gbps. Gigabyte did add a FireWire port at the back through a Texas Instrument controller. There are also quite a few USB headers and ports. We counted five at the rear, with a pair of USB 3.0 ones courtesy of NEC's controller.

While there are four DIMM slots that support up to 1333MHz DDR3 memory, Gigabyte states that they can take up to a maximum of 16GB of memory, which is half that of the 32GB total capacity that we saw on other boards. We suppose it's one area where Gigabyte is cutting back, as mainstream users are very unlikely to install that much memory. 

Due to the form factor, there are no issues when it comes to the layout. One can install dual-slot graphics cards even on this board as the onboard components are distributed evenly throughout, with the headers at the edges of the board.

Unlike the other vendors, Gigabyte has stuck with the old-school look and feel of its older BIOS. For those with larger HDDs, fret not as this board supports booting from large capacity drives (3GB+), but you won't get the conveniences of EFI BIOS out in the market like mouse support and a visually appealing user interface.