now this is one of the cooler and more Innovative z68 Boards out there this is
the z68 XP ud3 from Gigabyte Gigabyte's
usually pretty good at calling out their key features on the packaging so here
you can see it's the biggest feature there there's an onboard M SATA
connector well so what that means is you can use Intel's SRT caching feature
using a little onboard MSA Drive rather
than install an SSD in the actual system Drive Bay so it's very very compact very
very cool feature okay so it has a three-year warranty in the USA and
Canada has Ultra durable 3 supports NVIDIA SLI as well as AMD Crossfire X it
uses touch BIOS to support 3 TB plus drives it also has dual BIOS which
enables you to restore the BIOS even if you corrupt it during a flash driver
mosfets all ferite core chokes all lower RDS mosfets and all 50,000 hour Japanese
caps mean that even though the this is a ud3 value board it has very high build
quality finally up to four times faster performance using Intel SRT technology
means that you can install that MSA SSD
get way better performance and you don't actually have to buy a
high-capacity SSD for your system let's
see if there's anything on the back they have to say for themselves 3x USB power
is a great feature it allows you to run a hub or run higher powered devices off
of your USB ports it does support USB 3 as well as SATA 3 6 gbit per second so
let's get this baby opened up here's our little guide telling you not to install
an 1156 CPU that's good advice we have a user manual an IO shield with colored
coding as well as a driver DVD which you
should throw away and download the latest off the Gigabyte website Intel
smart response technology so up to four times faster performance these are this
is actually has a basis in reality unlike some manufacturer claims on
products yes it does perform way faster
using an SSD as a cache than with only a
hard drive you've got a multilingual installation guide book dual be home
theater sticker as well as a powered by Gigabyte
sticker an SLI connector black flexible
my favorite kind as well as two straight and two right angle SATA 3 6 gbit per
second cables here on the motherboard itself we
find a motherboard actually give me a your
guys I'm having a little bit of trouble getting this out why don't we try from
the other side yeah there we go okay so let's take
it out of the package now this is a value oriented board but high qual high
build quality and good features mean that you can actually build a very very
decent system around something like this throw a 2500k in there oh give me a sec
throw 8 gigs of RAM in there throw a GTX 560 or an HT 6870 something along those
lines you've got a very potent little gaming system so here you can see the
power design is a 6 plus one phase power we've also got a nice little mosfet
cooling heat sink up here in terms of the overall layout it's pretty standard
you got your LGA 1155 socket supporting core I3 i5 and i7 processors you got
your eight pin power in its ideal location up at the top left Edge you've
got support for dual Channel DDR3 memory these are clearly color coded so you
won't install them in the wrong slots your 24 pin power is along the right
hand Edge and it's also ideal location we have eight SATA ports okay so these
guys are running off a third party chipset those are SATA 36 gbit per
second ports these are running off the Intel chipset all six of these the white
ones are SATA 3 6 gbit per second and the blue ones are SATA 2 3 gbits per
second and apparently SATA port 5 will be disabled when the M SATA slot is in
use so those are wired up to the same port on the chipset itself in all
likelihood here's your front panel connectors here's your front USB 3
there's the front powered USB 2 so that can be used to charge tablets even high
powered devices we have two more front USB headers front fire wire as well as a
front audio header in terms of the PCI slot layout we've got a pretty good
layout here we've got two PCI e6x slots although this one is wired only for 8X
so if you're running SLI or Crossfire you're going to be running at 8X 8X
speeds we've got two 1 two 3 PCI e1x and
two PCI now if you install two dual Slot Cards you're going to be left with 1 PCI
and two PCIe 1X slots and here is the
MSA Intel smart response technology Port
here so you just use the little retention Clips you plug in an SSD there
and you can use that SSD in order to act
as a cache for a hard drive that you're using as your system boot drive so
that's in some ways a little bit more convenient and a little bit lower
profile than actually installing a separate Drive running a separate cable
and that's kind of more of hassle than this okay moving along to the back we've
got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0 ports a PS2
keyboard mouse combo Port optical audio out fire wire HDMI two USB 3.0 ports
gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio now this HDMI port is very useful because you can
use it in order to run Lucid virtue
which means you can use the Onboard video on your CPU for things like transcoding and use the dedicated
graphics installed down here for your gaming needs now the fan head on this
particular motherboard we've got our CPU 4 pin pwm up here we've got a three pin
right here we've got a three pin here a 4 pin pwm down here and that's pretty
much it this is a value board so you tend to see a little bit less in terms
of things like fan headers don't forget to check out my or to subscribe to my
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