today I'll be unboxing the Gigabyte z68x ud3h B3 so this has most of the
features you have come to expect from Gigabyte including touch BIOS hybrid EFI
technology which allows you to use 3 TB
plus hard drives a 3-year warranty in the US and Canada Ultra durable 3 it's
got NVIDIA SLI AMD Crossfire and it
supports all the latest Intel core I3 i5 and i7 processors on LGA 1155 let's look
around on the back of the board and have a look if they have anything else to say for themselves yes we've got dual BIOS
which allows you to restore it to the other physical BIOS chip even if you
corrupt the BIOS during a flash we have 3x USB power which allows you to charge
uh more powerful devices and run more powered devices off a hub than you can
on competing motherboards we have USB 3 SATA 3 6 gbit per second and Driver Moss
fets which reduces mounting area by 50% apparently interesting the onboard audio
includes a 108 DB sound to noise ratio
and that is definitely a good thing more sound less noise always a plus we have
four SATA cables included two straight to right angle we have an IO Shield
which has convenient color coating on it we have a little warning telling you not
to put a socket 1156 CPU in this board
and we have an SLI cable next we have a user manual with a useless utility DVD
download the latest off the Gigabyte website to make sure you have the latest
versions finally a dual be home theater sticker and a multilingual installation
guide book next we have the board itself which has foam look at that never seen
foam on a motherboard like that before and I'm not even being fous I
have never seen foam mounted on a motherboard like that so let's go ahead
and find out why it has foam on it take
that out oh beautiful motherboard especially for like a value price point
board so there you go that is to I'm going to go ahead and guess prevent the
mosfet heat sink from moving around during shipping there you go cuz it does
use plastic push pins so while those are not a risk while the board is stationary
while it's being moved around yeah it could loosen the uh bond between the
thermal compound and the mosfets themselves so let's have a look at the
overall layout of this guy right here we're going to start with our 1155
socket in the middle of the board so that's where you put your CPU then we're
going to move on to our looks like 1 2 3 4 6 plus one phase
power design we've got our 8 pin connector in the top left of the board
and its ideal location we've got our dual Channel DDR3 RAM over here on the
side and our 24 pin connector also in
its ideal location we've got seven SATA
ports so this is SATA 36 gbit per second
right here is SATA 36 GB per second and we've got three SATA 2 uh 3 gbit per
second so this one's running off the Intel chipset this one's running off a
third party chipset these ones are going to be your higher performing ones and
these are your fallbacks the last SATA port is going to be on the back panel of
the motherboard and I'm a big fan of that running Intel off the Intel chipset
because it can be more convenient for raid configurations here are our front
panel connectors as well as our front USB 3.0 fire wire powered front USB
remember you can charge a tablet off the one with the red background and then 1
two three more front USB headers in terms of the PCI slot layout we've got 1
2 3 PCI 1X 2 PCI 16x although this one
is only wired electrically to 8X and two
PCI slots this is a very very solid layout because it's going to give you
two PCI 1X and one PCI left if you
install two dual Slot Cards on the back here we've got a
variety of good features remember this is a z68 motherboard so we have video
out including VGA DVI HDMI and display
port yes everything is supported we've got 1 2 3 4 USB 2.0 ports one of those
PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports optical audio out fire wire ESAT off the Intel
chipset two USB 3.0 ports gigb Ethernet
and 7.1 audio out so I would say an
ideal type configuration for a motherboard like this is making sure
that you've got a nice decent quadcore CPU I mean if you're going to get the
z68 chipset you might as well go for a quad core this is a high-end chipset
also you're going to want to put most people aren't going to be running SLI or Crossfire on a board like this although
you will have the option so maybe go with a value board like or value card
like a good bang for I shouldn't say value cuz they're still expensive but a bang for the butt card like a GTX 560 or
a radon 6870 something along those lines RAM is so cheap these days so I'd
probably throw 8 gigs of RAM I'd throw an SSD in here remember this board
supports Lucid virtue so you can use the Onboard video here out the Onboard video
here and still use your dedicated graphics for games but you can use this
one to do video transcoding and it also supports Intel SRT technology so you can
take a 60 gig SSD even a SATA 31 throw
it on the SATA 3 port and then throw a a
big hard drive like a wd black on one of the other ports in order to use the SSD
as a cash for awesome performance without blowing a bunch of money on 120
or 240 gig s s SD thank you for checking
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