this is a couple of things first it is an
exciting new Gigabyte motherboard second
it is an exciting new Intel chipset so this is the same Intel lga 1155 platform
that supports the latest Intel core i7 core i5 core i3 processors it is made by
Gigabyte who we know and love okay it has 16 phases of power three year
warranty ultra durable three all those good Gigabyte technologies we like
NVIDIA sli dual CPU power interesting power engine
a and power engine b cool but it has a
really cool new feature this uses the z68 chipset so this is the z68xud4b3
what that means is that even if you install
okay get this a pci express graphics card or even two in sli or crossfire x
which is compatible with both you can still use the onboard video on
your Intel CPU because they've all got it on the lga 1155 platform to
accelerate things like video rendering
cool right so that is the pretty much
the killer app that makes the z68 different from the p67 chipset so let's
take just a brief moment here talk about some of the other Gigabyte technologies
that make this board special so usb power 3x is a pretty cool one actually
here i'm just going to cheat and i'm going to look at the chromebox usb power 3x so what that means is you can deliver
more power through the usb ports than their competitors usb 3.0 is awesome
love it sata3 also awesome love it okay
all ferrite core chokes all lower rds mosfets and all 50 000 japanese solid
caps as i mentioned before 16 phase power and
let me see three plus terabyte hard drives oh and this touch BIOS so
Gigabyte has implemented ue um
efi BIOS technology now with this line
of board so i don't think there's much here on the back that we really need to
talk about there is one more killer feature of the z68 but i'm going to talk
about it in a little while i'm just gonna that's a hook so you guys can't go
away just yet okay multilingual installation guidebook user manual
driver dvd download the latest off the Gigabyte website don't install lga 1156
cpus they are not compatible here is an io shield
oh and the ones with three times usb power are marked neat
we have ooh black flexible sli bridge i love little
touches like this where they include uh you know because the last thing you want
is you know you got like a shmexi you know great color scheme board and then
they go and include like a brown sli bridge it's like that's great i went and
built a high performance system in this and now it has to look stupid so we've
got two right angle SATA cables two straight SATA cables also black to match
the entirely black appearance of this
high performance z68 motherboard so let's go ahead and
get this baby out of the packaging here
and there it is now if you guys ever watch my Linus tech
tips show and you ever pay attention you might
remember one thing that i always talk about first whenever i see it
and that is matte black pcb love it love
everything about it it looks great it makes you feel like you just bought a
really premium quality product when it has that stealth black look to it you
know it's not overly shiny although there are accented shiny bits like the
CPU socket the battery but other than that it's just got like a dark
stealthy look to it love it okay so let's start with the CPU socket
as i mentioned before lj 1155 socket fully capable of using the full
capabilities of the CPU you put in including the CPU
cores as well as the GPU core even when you install another graphics card so all
the p67 all the h67 boards as soon as you install a graphics card boom turns
off the onboard video you can't use Intel's accelerated video
encoding software so that is a great feature to have for this chipset there
is that 20 rather 16 phase power design
so you can see all the phases here you can see the mosfet coolers are very
bulky very heat piped very capable looking okay you can see they're going
to get some incidental airflow from your CPU fan no matter how you situate it up
here in the top right top left corner this ideal location is the eight pin CPU
power connector here's our CPU fan connector over here we find
four ddr3 dimm slots all right so those
are dual channel this is the same basic technology we find on the p67 with that
onboard video inclusion to the technology list here we
have our 24 pin connector in its ideal location here we find two Gigabyte
chipset powered SATA 3 ports 2 Intel
chipset powered SATA 3 ports as well as 4 Intel chipset powered SATA 2 3 gigabit
per second ports so these are going to be the best ones i'd use these ones next
and then probably i'd fall back onto those ones unless you have a bunch of
sata3 six gigabit per second drives in which case i guess you'll need to use
these second here we have our front panel connectors here we have front usb
3. here we have one two three front usb
twos here we have front firewire front
audio in its ideal location along the bottom edge of the board not over here
like previous generation Gigabyte boards in terms of expansion ports we have two
PCIe 16x slots although you can clearly see this one is only wired for 8x so if
you do run crossfire or sli you're going to be running an 8x8x mode which doesn't
make very much difference in terms of performance two PCIe 1x two pci so if
you do install sli or crossfire with two dual slot cards you will be left with
one PCIe 1x and one pci slot for
expansion here on the back of the board you will find a whole lot of expansion
possibilities so first things first we've got one of those ps2 keyboard
mouse combo ports which i'm a big fan of we have one two
three four five six seven eight usb 2.0
ports uh coaxial and optical audio out
firewire that is power d SATA hold on i
think that's power d SATA let's find out nope that is esata3
oh esata3 really oh cool well that's a neat feature hold on in
just a minute here well you know what someone leave a comment on the video let me know if that
is actually a SATA 3 port because that's pretty neat for external storage if it
is so that is an esata3 slash usb
combo port and then this one is just straight esata3 here's usb 3.0 gigabit
Ethernet as well as 7.1 audio out and i actually you know what it's kind of
funny but i like the
this is almost like harkening back to the old Gigabyte days where their boards
had like the explosion of color on them here the board looks awesome which is
great so it means your system is going to look great and then at the back
they've gone back to the old Gigabyte ways which i actually kind of like it's kind of a nice little touch like you
know old school style we've got just a little bit of that Gigabyte flare on the
back of the system where it's i don't have to look at it unless i'm trying to
plug in a port in which case color coding everything helps a lot it's great
now i haven't talked about that other feature yet i've been saving it and
let's see what Intel smart response technologies what we're calling it so
basically what Intel smart response technology allows us to do
is it allows us to plug in an SSD into
one of the Intel ports and a hard drive and then use the SSD as a cache so we've
had products that have used this kind of technology in the past such as the
seagate momentous xt which had a built-in very small SSD
such as the HDD boost from silverstone
which allowed you to mount an SSD and then use a pass-through to run to a hard
drive but this is the first time we've seen it natively included on a chipset
so the z68 chipset has the graphics
feature which is very very important and then it also has the ability to use an
SSD as a cache for your hard drive so what that means is if you buy a small
SSD rather than installing your os installing one game on it and then going
oh where'd all my space go now i can't put anything else on my SSD instead you
put on the SSD it hides itself from you completely you plug in your hard drive
you bind them together i haven't actually tried it yet so i don't know how it works but you do that you have
the full capacity of your hard drive and then the system will intelligently store
your most frequently accessed files and programs onto the SSD so you can more
quickly access those Gigabyte claims up to a four time system performance
increase than with a hard drive only so that's very
cool thank you for checking out my unboxing of the z68x ud4b from Gigabyte
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