H97-HD3

$99 Gigabyte

If you’re looking for a bargain 9-series board the H97-HD3 is it. At this price it offers a huge saving, and doesn’t demand a similarly huge drop in performance to compensate. What are you missing out on in going from Z97 down to H97? Not much, especially now unofficial overclocking is possible. Mainly the two next-gen PCIe storage controllers. Those interfaces are more of a luxury right now anyway.

What you should worry about is any serious loss in processing speed, and the H97-HD3 is up there with the majority of Z97 boards. It beats its Z97X-SLI stablemate pretty much across all my benchmarking suite. And that includes overclocking: a top OC frequency of 4.6GHz is genuinely impressive stuff and bests the poor benchmark of the Z97X-SLI on the previous page.

The board offers multi-GPU support too— only CrossFireX, but at least the option is there for the AMD faithful.

If you’re after a competitive, bargain-priced Intel motherboard you’ll have a hard time tracking down a more effective offering than this excellent Gigabyte example.