Gigabyte Z97-HD3 Intel Z97 Motherboard

Motherboard Layout:

For the most part the Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 motherboard is laid out rather conventionally... In the upper-right hand corner are the four DDR3 memory slots that support DDR3-1600MHz or as fast as DDR3-3100MHz when maxed out within its overclocked mode. Next to the memory slots along the edge of the PCB is the 24-pin ATX power connector and USB 3.0 header.

In the bottom right corner of the motherboard are the six Serial ATA 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 headers, one USB 3.0 header, the front panel header, and the two BIOS chips. Along the bottom edge of the PCB, there's still headers for COMM and LPT.

The two PCI Express x16 slots are positioned two slots away from one another to allow for large graphics cards to be installed. Between the PCI-E x16 slots is one PCI Express x1 slot, the CMOS battery (thought a bit of a nuisance to remove if installing a large graphics card), and the Intel Z97 Express chipset. It's important to remember though the secondary PCI Express x16 slot is limited to PCI-E x4 bandwidth.

The area around the LGA-1150 CPU socket is free from any obstructions that would cause issues with after-market heatsinks, though there is a small heatsink to the north of the CPU socket area along with the 8-pin EPS 12V power connector.

At the rear of the motherboard there is two USB 2.0 ports, one PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, one VGA D-Sub, one DVI, one HDMI 1.4a, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and the analog audio jacks. Unfortunately there's no DisplayPort connectivity on this low-cost Gigabyte motherboard.