Gigabyte’s Z87 lineup in detail

We’ve already checked out the lineups from ASRock, MSI and ASUS. Now its the second-largest manufacturer’s turn and Gigabyte has some tricks of its own. All of the boards are compatible with Intel’s Haswell processors and feature the new LGA1150 socket.

Intel’s Haswell is the fourth-generation of Intel’s Core architecture and mixes in some new features, more power saving hardware and better integrated graphics. It requires a new socket (LGA 1150) and works with DDR3 RAM as usual.

The new Z87 chipset offers a lot of new features and ports, including upgrading all SATA ports to SATA 6GB/s speeds, more USB 3.0 front-panel headers, and extra PCI-Express 3.0 adaptability, giving some lower-end boards the ability to run two PCI-Express slots in x8/x8 mode for more dual-graphics performance.

Gigabyte Z87X-OC

Gigabyte Z87X-OC Force

Gigabyte Z87X G1 Sniper S

Gigabyte G1 Sniper Audio

Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H

Gigabyte GA-Z87N-Wifi

Gigabyte has segmented its lineup into three families: hardcore overclocking, gaming and enthusiast, or general user categories. The first up, the Z87X-OC, features a black and orange colour scheme and uses Intel’s Z87 chipset. Its an over-clocker’s board and it seems like everyone is following in ASRock’s OC Formula design by including controller buttons on the board itself. These control clock speed, voltage and a host of other features that you can dabble with, without going in to the BIOS.

Interestingly, it features only six SATA ports, but makes up for this with four PCI-Express lanes (speeds not yet detailed by Gigabyte), a feature-stripped layout and a huge amount of status LEDs peppered all around the board’s surface. This is complemented by the Z87X-OC Force, which features extra fans on the heatinks along with water cooling options, more SATA connectivity, tweaked power phases for the CPU and an extra PCI slot.

All OC models from Gigabyte will now come with a special bracket that fits onto the board to hold up your graphics cards and other PCI boards while bench-testing.

The Sniper family gets upgraded with the G1 Sniper S and the G1. The Sniper S looks almost identical in layout to the Z87X-OC but features a familiar heatsink design also found on the Force, ten SATA slots and on-board sound by Gigabyte’s in-house design team, called Sound Core 3D. The G1 is the mATX variant and isn’t pictured in full here, but should include six SATA ports and three PCI-E slots, along with what looks like gold-plated audio connectors.

The consumer or enthusiast line is served by the normal GA series. The GA-Z87X-UD5H has a redesigned heatsink cooler, ten SATA ports, two PCI-E 3.0 slots spaced nicely apart (the third is PCI-E 2.0) and sadly doesn’t get the Sound Core3D audio. Dynamite comes in small packages and the Z87N-Wifi is pictured here as well. It offers just four SATA 6GB/s ports, one PCI-Express slot and two DDR3 slots for a total of 32GB of RAM.

All in all, it looks like the two biggest names to watch here are ASRock and Gigabyte. Both are aiming for enthusiasts and gamers with some cool high-end features and I think overclockers will be especially happy with what Haswell has to offer.

Roll on 4 June, please!