ASUS P8Z68-V Pro SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,375 words · ~6 min read
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so today we have a pretty exciting product to unbox from isus this is the
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p8 z68 V Pro or if you prefer p8 z68 V
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Pro personally I don't care I'll say whatever sort of works with the sentence
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uh as many of you have noticed and commented one way or the other if I say
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Z there's Zed zealots running after me
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to tell me that it's wrong and this vice versa anyway this board features digital
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power design as well as their uh TPU and
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epu dual intelligent processors so these are for Energy savings and performance
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all right we've got full support for Intel's latest Core i5 I3 and i7
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processors on the LGA 1155 socket this
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uses the z68 chipset so what that means
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is that besides supporting those Technologies besides supporting SLI and
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Crossfire and all those performance featur Fe we also have support for Intel
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smart response SRT technology which means that you can use a small SSD 60
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gigs or smaller to boost the performance of your boot hard drive and we also have
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the Lucid virtue technology which allows
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you to use the Onboard video that's built into your core I3 I5 or i7 CPU to
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accelerate certain key things like video encoding while normally using your
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dedicated graphics card for gaming pretty sweet all right we got USB 3 a
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UEFI BIOS we have H BT go Bluetooth
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enjoyment maybe we'll have to find out what that is GPU boost for uh
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for increasing the performance of the onboard Graphics as well as their
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precise Digi plus vrm let's have a look at the back digital power design the new
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standard basically it's better okay we have the ultimate turbo processor so
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that's the TPU the epu for Energy Efficiency as I mentioned before oh here
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we go diverse Bluetooth enjoyment oh it means onboard Bluetooth okay ufi BIOS
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okay y that's pretty much it let's uh get this open
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oh I have never seen well at least not
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in a long no I don't think I've ever seen an isus board um that comes in a
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box like this where the board is on top
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of the package with the accessories underneath you know what then we're
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going to do something crazy and we're going to look at the board first and
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then the accessories because ASUS has gone and turned my world upside down
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with their packaging change here so here we go here's the motherboard itself
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let's start with the CPU socket where we normally start you don't have to move
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around so much just kind of top down is okay CPU socket so there's your LGA 1155
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socket which as I mentioned before feature support for the latest I3 i5 and
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i7 processors on the LGA 1155 socket you
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are surrounded by your 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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10 11 H 12 13 14 15 15 16 hm I don't know
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how many phases that power design is because I count 16 but it could be like
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a 14 + 2 or something like that so someone leave a comment on the video as
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well how many phases of power in the digi Plus vrm on the p8 z68 V Pro we
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have support for a dual Channel DDR3 memory and that is pretty typical for an
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1155 board because that's all the 1155
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onboard CPU uh DDR3 memory controller
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actually supports all right on the side here we have the epu and TPU switches if
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you do want to use those Technologies we also have the memo K button so what the
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memo K button allows you to do is take out of JD spec RAM modules and boot them
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up using a safe setting but then you can get into the BIOS and set them to
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whatever higher performance settings you desire our 24 pin and our 8 Pin
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connectors are in their ideal locations along the right hand edge of the board
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and at the top left respectively and moving down we have a USB 3 from front
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panel header so that will have support for all the latest cases with USB 3 that
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do use a pinout rather than a pass through from a normal Port like this
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okay so we've also got SATA ports Galore so we have four SATA 2 3 GB per second
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and 4 SATA 3 6 GB per second now these two right here are coming off the Intel
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controller and these two are coming off of a third party controller so if you
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did want to run like a six Drive raate array you would want to use these six so
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these are more like your auxiliary ones all right we've got a chipset cooler
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here using a similar kind of wave looking design to many of ASUS's recent
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motherboards we have two fire wire ports there's our front panel headers three
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USB 2.0 ports built-in switches I'm a
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big fan of these because I often use boards on a test bench this makes my
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life easier reset and power are both included front audio is right here and
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let's have a look at the PCI slot layout on this particular board we've got seven
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slots I love seeing Seven slots on an ATX form
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factor board you want to know why because that's the most you can have and
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I always like having the option to install more stuff rather than not
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having the option to install more stuff okay so we have three PCIe 16x slots
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right here the dark blue the white one and the black one uh these two it looks
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this one's wired for 16 this guy is wired for eight and this guy's wired
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for8 although I'm going to have to double check what bandwidth these
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actually run at we've got two PCI slots two PCI e1x slots and on the back we've
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got a pretty normal looking array of connectors we have four USB 6 USB 2.0
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ports our little Bluetooth guy right here we have optical audio out HDMI DVI
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and VGA out which are supported on all second generation core i7 processors
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unlike the first Generations where it was only supported on Dual course we
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have two USB 3.0 ports Intel Ethernet
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rather than a third party such as a real Tech Ethernet solution and 7.1 audio so
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now let's look at the accessories for anyone who actually cares about that
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okay one accessory we've got this is neat is a USB header to dual Port PCI
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bracket for the back so if you can if you don't have front USB 3 you can add a
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couple more ports to the back at the very least we have two us two SATA 3 6
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GB per second cables two USB 3 GB per
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second cables although they're identical other than the white color on the 6 GB
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per second ones and they're all right angle we have an SLI Bridge we have q
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connectors which are the easy connectors for the front panel headers an IO Shield
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a user guide A drivers and utilities DVD don't
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use it download the latest from the ASUS website as well as a SATA mode notice
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interesting okay how to turn on ahci
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mode which is good ahci mode is better than IDE mode for more performance and
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whatnot uh give me just a second here guys so I looked up the PCI E slots and
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I thought maybe because this one is wired for 8X they have some kind of uh
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splitter chip on here of some sort but they do not so it's
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16x 8X 8X or 8X 8X 4X just as with most
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p67 boards thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look don't forget to
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