Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3 Intel SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,696 words · ~8 min read
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this is a couple of things first it is an
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exciting new Gigabyte motherboard second
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it is an exciting new Intel chipset so this is the same Intel lga 1155 platform
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that supports the latest Intel core i7 core i5 core i3 processors it is made by
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Gigabyte who we know and love okay it has 16 phases of power three year
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warranty ultra durable three all those good Gigabyte technologies we like
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NVIDIA sli dual CPU power interesting power engine
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a and power engine b cool but it has a
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really cool new feature this uses the z68 chipset so this is the z68xud4b3
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what that means is that even if you install
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okay get this a pci express graphics card or even two in sli or crossfire x
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which is compatible with both you can still use the onboard video on
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your Intel CPU because they've all got it on the lga 1155 platform to
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accelerate things like video rendering
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cool right so that is the pretty much
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the killer app that makes the z68 different from the p67 chipset so let's
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take just a brief moment here talk about some of the other Gigabyte technologies
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that make this board special so usb power 3x is a pretty cool one actually
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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
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more power through the usb ports than their competitors usb 3.0 is awesome
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love it sata3 also awesome love it okay
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all ferrite core chokes all lower rds mosfets and all 50 000 japanese solid
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caps as i mentioned before 16 phase power and
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let me see three plus terabyte hard drives oh and this touch BIOS so
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Gigabyte has implemented ue um
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efi BIOS technology now with this line
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of board so i don't think there's much here on the back that we really need to
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talk about there is one more killer feature of the z68 but i'm going to talk
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about it in a little while i'm just gonna that's a hook so you guys can't go
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away just yet okay multilingual installation guidebook user manual
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driver dvd download the latest off the Gigabyte website don't install lga 1156
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cpus they are not compatible here is an io shield
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oh and the ones with three times usb power are marked neat
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we have ooh black flexible sli bridge i love little
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touches like this where they include uh you know because the last thing you want
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is you know you got like a shmexi you know great color scheme board and then
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they go and include like a brown sli bridge it's like that's great i went and
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built a high performance system in this and now it has to look stupid so we've
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got two right angle SATA cables two straight SATA cables also black to match
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the entirely black appearance of this
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high performance z68 motherboard so let's go ahead and
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get this baby out of the packaging here
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and there it is now if you guys ever watch my Linus tech
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tips show and you ever pay attention you might
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remember one thing that i always talk about first whenever i see it
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and that is matte black pcb love it love
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everything about it it looks great it makes you feel like you just bought a
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really premium quality product when it has that stealth black look to it you
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know it's not overly shiny although there are accented shiny bits like the
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CPU socket the battery but other than that it's just got like a dark
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stealthy look to it love it okay so let's start with the CPU socket
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as i mentioned before lj 1155 socket fully capable of using the full
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capabilities of the CPU you put in including the CPU
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cores as well as the GPU core even when you install another graphics card so all
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the p67 all the h67 boards as soon as you install a graphics card boom turns
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off the onboard video you can't use Intel's accelerated video
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encoding software so that is a great feature to have for this chipset there
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is that 20 rather 16 phase power design
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so you can see all the phases here you can see the mosfet coolers are very
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bulky very heat piped very capable looking okay you can see they're going
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to get some incidental airflow from your CPU fan no matter how you situate it up
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here in the top right top left corner this ideal location is the eight pin CPU
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power connector here's our CPU fan connector over here we find
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four ddr3 dimm slots all right so those
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are dual channel this is the same basic technology we find on the p67 with that
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onboard video inclusion to the technology list here we
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have our 24 pin connector in its ideal location here we find two Gigabyte
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chipset powered SATA 3 ports 2 Intel
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chipset powered SATA 3 ports as well as 4 Intel chipset powered SATA 2 3 gigabit
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per second ports so these are going to be the best ones i'd use these ones next
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and then probably i'd fall back onto those ones unless you have a bunch of
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sata3 six gigabit per second drives in which case i guess you'll need to use
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these second here we have our front panel connectors here we have front usb
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3. here we have one two three front usb
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twos here we have front firewire front
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audio in its ideal location along the bottom edge of the board not over here
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like previous generation Gigabyte boards in terms of expansion ports we have two
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PCIe 16x slots although you can clearly see this one is only wired for 8x so if
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you do run crossfire or sli you're going to be running an 8x8x mode which doesn't
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make very much difference in terms of performance two PCIe 1x two pci so if
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you do install sli or crossfire with two dual slot cards you will be left with
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one PCIe 1x and one pci slot for
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expansion here on the back of the board you will find a whole lot of expansion
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possibilities so first things first we've got one of those ps2 keyboard
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mouse combo ports which i'm a big fan of we have one two
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three four five six seven eight usb 2.0
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ports uh coaxial and optical audio out
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firewire that is power d SATA hold on i
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think that's power d SATA let's find out nope that is esata3
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oh esata3 really oh cool well that's a neat feature hold on in
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just a minute here well you know what someone leave a comment on the video let me know if that
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is actually a SATA 3 port because that's pretty neat for external storage if it
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is so that is an esata3 slash usb
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combo port and then this one is just straight esata3 here's usb 3.0 gigabit
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Ethernet as well as 7.1 audio out and i actually you know what it's kind of
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funny but i like the
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this is almost like harkening back to the old Gigabyte days where their boards
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had like the explosion of color on them here the board looks awesome which is
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great so it means your system is going to look great and then at the back
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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
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know old school style we've got just a little bit of that Gigabyte flare on the
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back of the system where it's i don't have to look at it unless i'm trying to
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plug in a port in which case color coding everything helps a lot it's great
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now i haven't talked about that other feature yet i've been saving it and
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let's see what Intel smart response technologies what we're calling it so
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basically what Intel smart response technology allows us to do
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is it allows us to plug in an SSD into
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one of the Intel ports and a hard drive and then use the SSD as a cache so we've
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had products that have used this kind of technology in the past such as the
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seagate momentous xt which had a built-in very small SSD
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such as the HDD boost from silverstone
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which allowed you to mount an SSD and then use a pass-through to run to a hard
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drive but this is the first time we've seen it natively included on a chipset
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so the z68 chipset has the graphics
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feature which is very very important and then it also has the ability to use an
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SSD as a cache for your hard drive so what that means is if you buy a small
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SSD rather than installing your os installing one game on it and then going
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oh where'd all my space go now i can't put anything else on my SSD instead you
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put on the SSD it hides itself from you completely you plug in your hard drive
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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
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the full capacity of your hard drive and then the system will intelligently store
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your most frequently accessed files and programs onto the SSD so you can more
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quickly access those Gigabyte claims up to a four time system performance
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increase than with a hard drive only so that's very
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cool thank you for checking out my unboxing of the z68x ud4b from Gigabyte
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