welcome to my unboxing of the z68 XP ud3p from Gigabyte this is a very value
oriented motherboard in terms of the price but a very performance and looks
and just generally awesome oriented motherboard when you have a look at the
features that are included uh which are all of the z68 features and let's go
through them so the first one is easy smart response which is a Gigabyte exclusive patent pending asteris Asterix
C LTD whatever the case may be basically what that means is it is a really easy
way to use Intel SRT or smart response technology which allows you to take a
large affordable hard drive and cash it improve the performance of it with a
small affordable SSD it works really well everyone who can't afford an SSD
for their system because the capacity that they need is just like oh well then
I can't afford that capacity I just won't get one do this instead touch bio
so hybrid EFI technology allows 3 terab plus hard drives okay 60% okay yeah yeah
ready for Intel's nextg 22 nanm CPUs very cool okay so that's Ivy Bridge
ready for Native PCI Express gen 3 so
upcoming graphics cards uh that won't be around for a while but there you go
supports it driver mosfets uh three times USB power which is a great feature
allows you to charge more devices or power more devices through a hub 12
phase power design on the board itself and here's all those z68 features so
Intel HD graphics if you don't want to put in a dedicated graphics card Quicks
sync which allows you to use the dedicated graphics and an integrated
graphics card in order to get great gaming performance and great uh uh video
encoding performance Lucid virtue that's the switchable Graphics that allows you
to do that and support for Intel's K series overclocking let me see if I'm
missing anything else on this very complicated and fooking box I don't
think so so let's have a look at what's included we've got got an HDMI to DVI
adapter these are handy we have an IO Shield which is helpfully colorcoded aha
flexible black SLI Bridge my very
favorite kind we have four SATA cables so two are right angle and two of them
are straight we have a users manual
including a driver DVD don't use this download the latest from the Gigabyte
website as well as a guide for smart response technology which you probably
won't need a guide for because it's so easy with the gab utility multilingual
installation guide book I actually have a video about that on my ncixcom channel
so you can feel free to check that out and uh I show you how to install SRT
technology using the Gigabyte utility which is basically you download the exe
to your desktop and then you run
it yeah really it's that easy although I
have had people ask me so do you install the OS initially to the hard drive and
the answer is yes you do and then you add the SSD later all right so let's
look at the layout of the board overall it's a very slick looking all black
board so we've got almost nothing on here that's not black or white or silver
or Chrome or some sort of shade in between we've got yeah I know that's
white we've got a little blue accents on some of the capacitors but look how nice
that looks guys all right so there's our LGA 1155 socket compatible with the
latest core I3 Core i5 and core i7 CPUs
we've got a nice beefy power design which I do not expect to see normally on
a ud3 class board this is more like what I'd expect to see on a ud4 or ud5 class
of board but Gigabyte's really gone all out on this one we've got our eight pin
power connector and its ideal location in the top left I'll go through fan
headers later we've got pretty beefy looking cooling but they are attached by
plastic pegs so be a little bit careful with those when you're taking them out of the box just make sure you got good
contact between the mosfets and the heat sinks and then you shouldn't have too much to worry about we've got four DDR3
dim slots supporting dual Channel memory we've got our 24 pin connector in its
ideal location along the right hand Edge Gigabyte SATA ports are right here so
those are powered by a thirdparty chipset if you're running SATA 3 drives
I would highly recommend you stick with the two Intel powered ones which are right here and then you've also got four
SATA 2 connectors to go along with those so total of eight SATA connectors our
chipset heat sink is right here nice and low profile so you're not going to have any problems with graphics cards being
interfered with we've got our front panel connector our TPM
uh we've got front USB 3 right about here front High powerered USB 2 so
that's for charging your iPad or other tablet with the included utility one two
more front panel usb2 ports we've got front fire wire front audio and then
we've got what looks like a fairly ideal setup so three PCI e1x of which two of
them will be available when you install a dual slot graphics card two PCI of
which one will be available when you install a dual slot graphics card so
that gives you room for one two three more uh devices in addition to your SLI
or Crossfire graphics cards and you can have one PCI and two PCI
e1x on the back of the board we find almost nothing except you can see that
that chipset heat sink maybe due to its size is affixed by screws so that's nice
to see on the back we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 USB 2.0 ports one of those PS2 mouse
keyboard combo ports optical audio out HDMI out that is what gives you the
ability to use Lucid virtue and Intel Quicks sync technology and then we've
got two USB 3.0 ports gabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out don't forget also you know
what I don't think they even mentioned this on the box I can't believe they didn't mention that must be on here
somewhere yeah there it is okay dual BIOS yeah don't forget about dual BIOS
dual BIOS is awesome because it means that if your BIOS gets pooched you can
actually restore to the other BIOS chip no problem so that's a very convenient
feature makes it so that you are less likely to brick a Gigabyte board with a
BIOS flash than anything that doesn't have dual BIOS thank you for checking
out my video don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips from unboxings reviews
and other computer videos