Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3P Z68 Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,237 words · ~6 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the z68 XP ud3p from Gigabyte this is a very value
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oriented motherboard in terms of the price but a very performance and looks
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and just generally awesome oriented motherboard when you have a look at the
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features that are included uh which are all of the z68 features and let's go
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through them so the first one is easy smart response which is a Gigabyte exclusive patent pending asteris Asterix
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C LTD whatever the case may be basically what that means is it is a really easy
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way to use Intel SRT or smart response technology which allows you to take a
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large affordable hard drive and cash it improve the performance of it with a
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small affordable SSD it works really well everyone who can't afford an SSD
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for their system because the capacity that they need is just like oh well then
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I can't afford that capacity I just won't get one do this instead touch bio
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so hybrid EFI technology allows 3 terab plus hard drives okay 60% okay yeah yeah
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ready for Intel's nextg 22 nanm CPUs very cool okay so that's Ivy Bridge
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ready for Native PCI Express gen 3 so
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upcoming graphics cards uh that won't be around for a while but there you go
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supports it driver mosfets uh three times USB power which is a great feature
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allows you to charge more devices or power more devices through a hub 12
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phase power design on the board itself and here's all those z68 features so
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Intel HD graphics if you don't want to put in a dedicated graphics card Quicks
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sync which allows you to use the dedicated graphics and an integrated
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graphics card in order to get great gaming performance and great uh uh video
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encoding performance Lucid virtue that's the switchable Graphics that allows you
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to do that and support for Intel's K series overclocking let me see if I'm
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missing anything else on this very complicated and fooking box I don't
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think so so let's have a look at what's included we've got got an HDMI to DVI
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adapter these are handy we have an IO Shield which is helpfully colorcoded aha
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flexible black SLI Bridge my very
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favorite kind we have four SATA cables so two are right angle and two of them
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are straight we have a users manual
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including a driver DVD don't use this download the latest from the Gigabyte
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website as well as a guide for smart response technology which you probably
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won't need a guide for because it's so easy with the gab utility multilingual
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installation guide book I actually have a video about that on my ncixcom channel
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so you can feel free to check that out and uh I show you how to install SRT
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technology using the Gigabyte utility which is basically you download the exe
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to your desktop and then you run
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it yeah really it's that easy although I
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have had people ask me so do you install the OS initially to the hard drive and
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the answer is yes you do and then you add the SSD later all right so let's
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look at the layout of the board overall it's a very slick looking all black
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board so we've got almost nothing on here that's not black or white or silver
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or Chrome or some sort of shade in between we've got yeah I know that's
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white we've got a little blue accents on some of the capacitors but look how nice
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that looks guys all right so there's our LGA 1155 socket compatible with the
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latest core I3 Core i5 and core i7 CPUs
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we've got a nice beefy power design which I do not expect to see normally on
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a ud3 class board this is more like what I'd expect to see on a ud4 or ud5 class
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of board but Gigabyte's really gone all out on this one we've got our eight pin
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power connector and its ideal location in the top left I'll go through fan
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headers later we've got pretty beefy looking cooling but they are attached by
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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
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contact between the mosfets and the heat sinks and then you shouldn't have too much to worry about we've got four DDR3
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dim slots supporting dual Channel memory we've got our 24 pin connector in its
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ideal location along the right hand Edge Gigabyte SATA ports are right here so
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those are powered by a thirdparty chipset if you're running SATA 3 drives
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I would highly recommend you stick with the two Intel powered ones which are right here and then you've also got four
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SATA 2 connectors to go along with those so total of eight SATA connectors our
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chipset heat sink is right here nice and low profile so you're not going to have any problems with graphics cards being
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interfered with we've got our front panel connector our TPM
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uh we've got front USB 3 right about here front High powerered USB 2 so
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that's for charging your iPad or other tablet with the included utility one two
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more front panel usb2 ports we've got front fire wire front audio and then
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we've got what looks like a fairly ideal setup so three PCI e1x of which two of
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them will be available when you install a dual slot graphics card two PCI of
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which one will be available when you install a dual slot graphics card so
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that gives you room for one two three more uh devices in addition to your SLI
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or Crossfire graphics cards and you can have one PCI and two PCI
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e1x on the back of the board we find almost nothing except you can see that
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that chipset heat sink maybe due to its size is affixed by screws so that's nice
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to see on the back we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6
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7 8 USB 2.0 ports one of those PS2 mouse
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keyboard combo ports optical audio out HDMI out that is what gives you the
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ability to use Lucid virtue and Intel Quicks sync technology and then we've
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got two USB 3.0 ports gabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out don't forget also you know
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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
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somewhere yeah there it is okay dual BIOS yeah don't forget about dual BIOS
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dual BIOS is awesome because it means that if your BIOS gets pooched you can
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actually restore to the other BIOS chip no problem so that's a very convenient
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feature makes it so that you are less likely to brick a Gigabyte board with a
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BIOS flash than anything that doesn't have dual BIOS thank you for checking
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