Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,135 words · ~5 min read
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now this is one of the cooler and more Innovative z68 Boards out there this is
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the z68 XP ud3 from Gigabyte Gigabyte's
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usually pretty good at calling out their key features on the packaging so here
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you can see it's the biggest feature there there's an onboard M SATA
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connector well so what that means is you can use Intel's SRT caching feature
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using a little onboard MSA Drive rather
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than install an SSD in the actual system Drive Bay so it's very very compact very
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very cool feature okay so it has a three-year warranty in the USA and
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Canada has Ultra durable 3 supports NVIDIA SLI as well as AMD Crossfire X it
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uses touch BIOS to support 3 TB plus drives it also has dual BIOS which
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enables you to restore the BIOS even if you corrupt it during a flash driver
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mosfets all ferite core chokes all lower RDS mosfets and all 50,000 hour Japanese
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caps mean that even though the this is a ud3 value board it has very high build
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quality finally up to four times faster performance using Intel SRT technology
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means that you can install that MSA SSD
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get way better performance and you don't actually have to buy a
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high-capacity SSD for your system let's
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see if there's anything on the back they have to say for themselves 3x USB power
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is a great feature it allows you to run a hub or run higher powered devices off
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of your USB ports it does support USB 3 as well as SATA 3 6 gbit per second so
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let's get this baby opened up here's our little guide telling you not to install
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an 1156 CPU that's good advice we have a user manual an IO shield with colored
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coding as well as a driver DVD which you
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should throw away and download the latest off the Gigabyte website Intel
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smart response technology so up to four times faster performance these are this
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is actually has a basis in reality unlike some manufacturer claims on
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products yes it does perform way faster
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using an SSD as a cache than with only a
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hard drive you've got a multilingual installation guide book dual be home
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theater sticker as well as a powered by Gigabyte
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sticker an SLI connector black flexible
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my favorite kind as well as two straight and two right angle SATA 3 6 gbit per
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second cables here on the motherboard itself we
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find a motherboard actually give me a your
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guys I'm having a little bit of trouble getting this out why don't we try from
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the other side yeah there we go okay so let's take
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it out of the package now this is a value oriented board but high qual high
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build quality and good features mean that you can actually build a very very
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decent system around something like this throw a 2500k in there oh give me a sec
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throw 8 gigs of RAM in there throw a GTX 560 or an HT 6870 something along those
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lines you've got a very potent little gaming system so here you can see the
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power design is a 6 plus one phase power we've also got a nice little mosfet
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cooling heat sink up here in terms of the overall layout it's pretty standard
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you got your LGA 1155 socket supporting core I3 i5 and i7 processors you got
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your eight pin power in its ideal location up at the top left Edge you've
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got support for dual Channel DDR3 memory these are clearly color coded so you
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won't install them in the wrong slots your 24 pin power is along the right
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hand Edge and it's also ideal location we have eight SATA ports okay so these
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guys are running off a third party chipset those are SATA 36 gbit per
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second ports these are running off the Intel chipset all six of these the white
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ones are SATA 3 6 gbit per second and the blue ones are SATA 2 3 gbits per
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second and apparently SATA port 5 will be disabled when the M SATA slot is in
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use so those are wired up to the same port on the chipset itself in all
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likelihood here's your front panel connectors here's your front USB 3
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there's the front powered USB 2 so that can be used to charge tablets even high
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powered devices we have two more front USB headers front fire wire as well as a
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front audio header in terms of the PCI slot layout we've got a pretty good
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layout here we've got two PCI e6x slots although this one is wired only for 8X
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so if you're running SLI or Crossfire you're going to be running at 8X 8X
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speeds we've got two 1 two 3 PCI e1x and
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two PCI now if you install two dual Slot Cards you're going to be left with 1 PCI
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and two PCIe 1X slots and here is the
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MSA Intel smart response technology Port
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here so you just use the little retention Clips you plug in an SSD there
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and you can use that SSD in order to act
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as a cache for a hard drive that you're using as your system boot drive so
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that's in some ways a little bit more convenient and a little bit lower
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profile than actually installing a separate Drive running a separate cable
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and that's kind of more of hassle than this okay moving along to the back we've
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got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0 ports a PS2
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keyboard mouse combo Port optical audio out fire wire HDMI two USB 3.0 ports
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gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio now this HDMI port is very useful because you can
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use it in order to run Lucid virtue
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which means you can use the Onboard video on your CPU for things like transcoding and use the dedicated
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graphics installed down here for your gaming needs now the fan head on this
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particular motherboard we've got our CPU 4 pin pwm up here we've got a three pin
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right here we've got a three pin here a 4 pin pwm down here and that's pretty
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much it this is a value board so you tend to see a little bit less in terms
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of things like fan headers don't forget to check out my or to subscribe to my
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