Gigabyte GA-Z270M-D3H Ultra-Durable Motherboard - Black

I wanted three things from my first Z170 motherboard, great features and spec, easy driver and BIOS updates and good stability and reliability. This product ticks all those boxes. The board is very feature rich with virtually every comms tech you are likely to need all of which work flawlessly with all of the accessories I have thrown at it. Bluetooth and WiFi work straight out of the box. In summary a great product which I would highly recommend if you are building your first ITX PC.

Bought an intel i5-7500 CPU and an Asus Z170 motherboard. Found the motherboard doesn't support 7th gen CPUs, so I got this.Arrived next morning with express delivery and works fine now.Using 2 x 8GB Kingston Black Hyper Fury X.Used a 650W power supply with this, not plugged in a GPU as A) it's main use isn't for gaming and B) I can't afford one yet.Lights up with an orange light.

Works perfect, no issues at all so far. VRM Heatsinks would've been nice though

As expected of a Z170 board this provides all the ports that can fit in such a small footprint. Of note, the M2 slot on the rear of the board can take either a SATA or NVMe/PCIe SSD. If you place a SATA SSD then the SATA port0 is disabled. If you use a PCIe SSD then both port0 and port5 are knocked out.Analogue video is dead so onboard there are only DVI-D and HDMI. D-Sub 15 VGA is nowhere to be seen. The USB Type-C socket on the IO panel is USB3 not USB3.1 so no 10Gb/s goodness, Thunderbolt nor DisplayPort, sadly.The front panel header is near the front of the board rather than the usual rear of the lower edge. Finally, a designer has got the logic right, woohee. That said, the FPAudio header is still near the rear of the board next to the codec. The audio codec and circuitry is surrounded by a ground trace and the audio capacitors appear to be high quality. Also, there is a snazzy little trace LED around the audio circuit highlighting the isolation in green (only). This can be turned off in the EFI if you dont like it.The USB3 internal header is right next to the CPU socket, so be wary of HSFs with a long, low overhang. I had to, very carefully, mangle the USB3 cable end into a right-angle shape to clear the underside of a low-profile cooler by slicing away parts of the strain-relief sleeve of the plug. This the reason I gave only 4 stars.There are plenty of options in the EFI for both auto and manual overclocking, and the power phases appear sufficient for fault-free moderate overclocks.RAID setups in EFI are a breeze after setting SATAConfiguration type to RAID. Be aware that as of this writing, the Samsung Magician SSD manager has a bug that fails to recognise AHCI drivers when in RAID mode, so if you are fitting a Sammy SATA SSD ignore the Magician software.All socket 1151 CPUs upto Skylake are recognised, KabyLake will likely need a firmware update when a desktop SKU is released, assuming intel ship it in 1151 package.The accessories are fairly meagre with only a pair of SATA3 cables, only one of which is right-angled. There is the usual IO plate, a neat loop aeriel for the onboard wifi and a motherboard driver and applications disc with separate disc for the wifi drivers and application. The manual is English only and is comprehensive upto starting OS installation. There are no explanations for the bundled software. Look to the driver disc for a more extensive description of those.Overall, this is a rather pleasant mITX board with only a few shortcomings. FWIW I feel the price is good for this standard.

This is an excellent motherboard which lives up to expectations.

Works as expected under Windows and Linux.

Very Happy ****

Poor board NOT! as good as Asus boards UEFI Bios poor layout compared to an Asus Board i had.