Replacement Motherboard query

Personally I like the ud5h. Just got a couple of them for system upgrades and they work well. Many motherboards use analog/hybrid power phases which comes into play when overclocking. Digital power phases are preferred and many sites will list x amount of power phases but rarely are they accurate. They often use doublers on the motherboard.

The ud5h has 6 true digital phases, the gaming 7 and gt have 8, but only have 8 ferrite chokes compared to 12 on the ud5h. I think the gaming gt is a bit overpriced. The Ranger uses 4 digital phases, the Hero uses 8 but both are pretty expensive. Part of what drew me to the ud5h was the dual network ports since part of my requirements include networking and it's one of the few boards that still featured the intel lan port so I'm not stuck with the potential headaches of the killer e2200 nic.

It may come down to looks for you since I think your case has a window. Some people have a color scheme they're going for. I will say this, most of the pics of the ud5h don't look that great, the vrm and pch heatsinks look like a nasty yellow orange. In reality they're more of a brassy gold, metallic. There's also a bright orange led near the lower right corner of the board, the digital status readout is bright red but clear (not blinding) and there's a faint orange pinstripe that's backlit along the left side near the edge of the pci slots resembling a circuit trace. With a dual height video card in place, it hides half of the pch heatsink.

Not trying to sell you on any one particular board, all of those are good z97 boards. I just happen to have the ud5h and thought I'd share my impression of it and try to share other aspects like visuals which may make a difference to you since you have a windowed case. Doesn't really affect me since currently both systems are windowless so color matching didn't really come into play (it does for some people).

I'm sure the z97x gaming 7 would also be an excellent board. Just took a quick look and fortunately it has all 9 motherboard standoffs typical of full atx boards. The gaming 5 decided to make the board a little narrower and left out a couple standoffs which left areas like the upper right near the ram slots unsupported. Potential issue of flexing the motherboard installing ram into the mobo once it's mounted. Not the case with the gaming 7.