Gigabyte Z97M-DS3H Motherboard Review

Gaming Results

Next, some real world gaming tests. We played Battlefield 4 and Titanfall online, three sessions of 180 seconds each. We took the best performance overall. All in the same maps and game modes and with a ping of less than 30ms consistently on a GigaLan. We have included the video settings for each game and the Nvidia control panel was set to “Performance” using the slider.

Silk Road Team Death match, only the best will do!

Battlefield 4 performance is excellent, even if a little more GPU oriented. We have used and older, but still capable GTX770, with no drop below 60FPS.

Next Titanfall

Titanfall stress the little Z97M-DS3H set up a little more, though no results dropped below 35FPS, still respectable for a budget gaming rig using an older graphics card.

Conclusion

The Gigabyte Z97M-DS3H Motherboard is a solid all round Z97 motherboard. It is not packing the top line LAN, audio or SLi features but it is going to perform in a single graphics card set up. It is also just £71.79 on the Amazon store making it excellent value for more and a true performance/feature price point motherboard.

Gigabyte Z97M-DS3H Motherboard

On the downsides, the default BIOS isn’t pretty, though that’s only our view and the bundle is a bit light. A few more SATA cables would have been in order, at least so the end user, maybe their first build, could utilise more than two SATA ports without buying more after they discovered only two arrive in the box.

If you have an AMD R9 270 or even an older GTX770, you will get on the gaming ladder with this motherboard in a very respectable position. Also, it has a nice and neutral colour scheme, making it a perfect match for most builds, it is not going to clash with your colours schemes!