Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,075 words · ~5 min read
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today I'll be unboxing the Gigabyte z68x ud3h B3 so this has most of the
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features you have come to expect from Gigabyte including touch BIOS hybrid EFI
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technology which allows you to use 3 TB
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plus hard drives a 3-year warranty in the US and Canada Ultra durable 3 it's
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got NVIDIA SLI AMD Crossfire and it
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supports all the latest Intel core I3 i5 and i7 processors on LGA 1155 let's look
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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
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which allows you to restore it to the other physical BIOS chip even if you
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corrupt the BIOS during a flash we have 3x USB power which allows you to charge
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uh more powerful devices and run more powered devices off a hub than you can
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on competing motherboards we have USB 3 SATA 3 6 gbit per second and Driver Moss
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fets which reduces mounting area by 50% apparently interesting the onboard audio
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includes a 108 DB sound to noise ratio
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and that is definitely a good thing more sound less noise always a plus we have
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four SATA cables included two straight to right angle we have an IO Shield
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which has convenient color coating on it we have a little warning telling you not
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to put a socket 1156 CPU in this board
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and we have an SLI cable next we have a user manual with a useless utility DVD
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download the latest off the Gigabyte website to make sure you have the latest
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versions finally a dual be home theater sticker and a multilingual installation
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guide book next we have the board itself which has foam look at that never seen
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foam on a motherboard like that before and I'm not even being fous I
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have never seen foam mounted on a motherboard like that so let's go ahead
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and find out why it has foam on it take
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that out oh beautiful motherboard especially for like a value price point
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board so there you go that is to I'm going to go ahead and guess prevent the
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mosfet heat sink from moving around during shipping there you go cuz it does
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use plastic push pins so while those are not a risk while the board is stationary
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while it's being moved around yeah it could loosen the uh bond between the
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thermal compound and the mosfets themselves so let's have a look at the
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overall layout of this guy right here we're going to start with our 1155
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socket in the middle of the board so that's where you put your CPU then we're
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going to move on to our looks like 1 2 3 4 6 plus one phase
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power design we've got our 8 pin connector in the top left of the board
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and its ideal location we've got our dual Channel DDR3 RAM over here on the
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side and our 24 pin connector also in
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its ideal location we've got seven SATA
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ports so this is SATA 36 gbit per second
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right here is SATA 36 GB per second and we've got three SATA 2 uh 3 gbit per
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second so this one's running off the Intel chipset this one's running off a
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third party chipset these ones are going to be your higher performing ones and
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these are your fallbacks the last SATA port is going to be on the back panel of
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the motherboard and I'm a big fan of that running Intel off the Intel chipset
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because it can be more convenient for raid configurations here are our front
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panel connectors as well as our front USB 3.0 fire wire powered front USB
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remember you can charge a tablet off the one with the red background and then 1
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two three more front USB headers in terms of the PCI slot layout we've got 1
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2 3 PCI 1X 2 PCI 16x although this one
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is only wired electrically to 8X and two
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PCI slots this is a very very solid layout because it's going to give you
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two PCI 1X and one PCI left if you
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install two dual Slot Cards on the back here we've got a
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variety of good features remember this is a z68 motherboard so we have video
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out including VGA DVI HDMI and display
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port yes everything is supported we've got 1 2 3 4 USB 2.0 ports one of those
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PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports optical audio out fire wire ESAT off the Intel
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chipset two USB 3.0 ports gigb Ethernet
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and 7.1 audio out so I would say an
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ideal type configuration for a motherboard like this is making sure
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that you've got a nice decent quadcore CPU I mean if you're going to get the
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z68 chipset you might as well go for a quad core this is a high-end chipset
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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
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you will have the option so maybe go with a value board like or value card
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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
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a radon 6870 something along those lines RAM is so cheap these days so I'd
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probably throw 8 gigs of RAM I'd throw an SSD in here remember this board
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supports Lucid virtue so you can use the Onboard video here out the Onboard video
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here and still use your dedicated graphics for games but you can use this
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one to do video transcoding and it also supports Intel SRT technology so you can
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take a 60 gig SSD even a SATA 31 throw
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it on the SATA 3 port and then throw a a
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big hard drive like a wd black on one of the other ports in order to use the SSD
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as a cash for awesome performance without blowing a bunch of money on 120
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or 240 gig s s SD thank you for checking
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