GIGABYTE GA-Z77MX-D3H LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Excellent board that comes with 2 SATAII and 2 SATAIII cables. The bios is amazing and gives a ton of information and options.

Cons: None as of yet.

Other Thoughts: I found a few of the screw placements a bit awkward but that's more the form factor than the board I guess.

Pros: Has quite a bit of room, very durable and easy to use. It was able to support everything I had and was compact enough to leave space for wiring. The Driver CD has all the tools you need to use everything to the fullest potential. Just make sure you read the manual before doing anything.

Cons: Make sure you know that this is a MICRO motherboard. It is small, but it works with everything you would need to put a computer together.

Other Thoughts: Good buy, great value. Small but powerful.

Pros: Great and feature rich for the money. Handles my simple overclocking needs easily. BIOS is easy to navigate. Decently spacious for a micro-atx board. 4 memory slots.

Cons: none really. It only has 6 sata I guess but the description shows that.

Other Thoughts: 3570k
7850
crucial ballistix sport 1600 DDR3

Pros: Worked well until Windows 8 was installed.

Cons: -BIOS mysteriously got messed up after a month of use. Very hard to explain what went wrong with the bios other than the fact it is unusable. (Mobo still works though)
-It appears that the PCI 3.0 slot is dead on the card since I know it's not my graphic card's fault.

Other Thoughts: Buy something better for your machine! Don't let its seemingly nice features fool you.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for your comments. Honest and constructive opinions are always welcome. We apologize for your difficulty with your Gigabyte product. Please update your motherboard BIOS to the latest for correcting some Windows8 issues.

If you require further assistance, please contact us at newegg-support@gigabyte-usa.com with the case number 2013011509 in the subject line. We will provide personalized service and analysis to help solve your issue as soon as possible.

GIGABYTE VIP Support Team

Pros: EFI was easy to use with no glitches. Able to set up RAM timings with no issues. No problems with the layout in my case.

Its been a smooth experience. Using latest BIOS and Drivers.

Cons: None

Other Thoughts: I pick this mATX board due to the great reviews on it and its doing very well. I will keep this board on the top of my list if I need to get another.

Pros: Nice Z77 with UEFI Bios (GUI Bios)
Comes with an SLI cable
Micro ATX but still packs many features
I don't overclock, but it has overclock utilities to make it easy

Cons: Zynga garbage auto installs with the drivers
Had many audio issues with the built in audio, seemed to lag.

Pros: Price is on the lower end of the spectrum for z77 based m-atx motherboards. It still has good features, and overclocks well considering the price. With a 3570k I reached a max overclock of 4.7ghz with ~1.35v. I am limited by my cooling (Antec 920 Kuhler), so on air I would expect possibly 4.5ghz may be the limit (of course dependent on your CPU's ability).

Cons: If you are interested in crossfireX/SLI, the PCI-E x16 slots are slot 1 and 4, so be sure you have a case that has at least 5 expansion slots. For m-atx cases there are very few that can support that. I use a NZXT Rogue case, so cannot support crossfire/SLI. The Rosewill Line-M case looks to be one of the best m-atx cases for the task with G-byte m-atx motherboards for SLI/crossfire.

Other Thoughts: I had been deciding on a m-atx motherboard for an Ivy Bridge build for a couple weeks. Primarily the Asrock Professional M and Gigabyte G1.Sniper M. As I was about to order the Asrock, I noticed that this board was $40 cheaper and came with free memory. Kind of an impulse buy, but I am very satisfied with it so far.

Pros: Friend gave me $50 for it. After we found the cause of the problem the board seemed to work with another cpu.

Cons: Dropped the cpu in and it booted for a few seconds. After a good light and a magnifying glass to the socket problem solved. We found very small pieces of what looked like brass or some other metal under the pins of the socket. Fried the cpu in the process (tried it on 3 different boards.) Customer service tried to help but I wasn't really in need of a replacement of the board but the cpu it fried.

Other Thoughts: Went with a MSI-Z77A-GD65 board and I am loving that decision. It's auto overclock alone got my I5 up to 4.10GHz and I am running it stable at 4.50GHz.

Manufacturer Response:

Thank you for your comments. Honest and constructive opinions are always welcome. We apologize for your difficulty with your Gigabyte product.

If you require further assistance, please contact us at newegg-support@gigabyte-usa.com with the case number 2012112601 in the subject line.

Gigabyte VIP Support Team

Pros: -Easy install; no extra work or "tweaking" with the Ivy Bridge processor I put in.
-Worked as advertised.

Cons: -None that I can think of, which is a good thing because I'm pretty opinionated with tech stuff.

Other Thoughts: Owned for just over a month now. Happy with the install and performance. Fits into my APEX DM-387 Black Steel Micro ATX case just fine.

Pros: I have installed two of these motherboards, and both have provided excellent service to date. One board has been in service for four months (purchased at Newegg) and the other board has been in service six months that was purchased elsewhere. My original review Pros still stand (all solid caps, fully digital VRM, easy to use BIOS) and the boards have not displayed any instability or compatibility issues. Both boards are on the F15 BIOS, and Gigabyte does a STELLAR JOB of keeping the BIOS updates coming plus keeping the drivers up to date on their website. In my experience, Gigabyte does a much better job than ASUS in the driver department especially. Gigabyte has the latest and greatest Win8 drivers already listed. I highly recommend this board.

Cons: Be careful when it comes to the "multi core enhancement" thing. Basically, the board will skip the whole Intel specified Enhanced Speed Step and jack all the cores to max speed during load. This is, in my opinion, dangerous to your CPU if you are using the default Intel CPU cooler. I had load temps reach 100 degrees C in a Prime95 stress test on the default Intel CPU cooler. Not to mention it voids your CPU warranty since it is technically overclocking. If you want to use the Gigabyte default multi-core enhancement then by all means do so but get a good CPU cooler. If not, then go into the BIOS and ENABLE the Intel Enhanced Speed Step setting. It is set to AUTO which is very misleading. AUTO would seem to enable the Intel specified profile since it is available but instead AUTO means it won't be used and the Gigabyte profile will. On BIOS updates, where it is wise to load setup defaults after the update and then set everything up again you will need to remember to change the settings so you won't be overclocking if the Gigabyte profile is not want you want.

Other Thoughts: There is now a B.1 rev of this board. I do not know what changed on the newer rev. You might want to make sure you get the newer rev.

Neither board is being overclocked, and both are using the Intel specified profile for Speed Step. The following configs are in use:

Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H boards, two of them, F15 BIOS
Both systems running Win7 x64 OEM Home Premium

First system differences:

MSI Radeon OC 7950
Crucial Ballistix Sport 8 GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1600, 1.5V
Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 480GB SSD as primary
Western Digital Blue 1TB 7200 RPM HDD as mass storage
Core i5-3570K at default clock
LG BD-RW/DVD/RW
Microsoft keyboard and mouse, USB on both
ASUS N15 PCI-E x1 B/G/N WiFi adapter
Corsair TX-650v2 PSU

Second system differences:

Sapphire Toxic Edition Radeon 6950, unlocked to 6970
Team 8 GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1600, 1.5V
Plextor M3 256GB SSD as primary and ONLY drive
Core i5-3570K at default clock
ASUS DVD/RW
GE wireless keyboard and mouse, USB micro receiver
Seasonic Modular M12II 520W PSU