Gadgetory

now this is one of the cooler and more innovative z68 boards out there this is the Z 68 XP ud3 from gigabyte gigabytes usually pretty good at calling out their key features on the packaging so here you can see it's the biggest feature there there's an onboard M SATA connector whistle what that means is you can use intel's srt caching feature using a little onboard M SATA Drive rather than installing an SSD in the actual system drive base so it's very very compact very very cool feature okay so it has a three year warranty in the USA and Canada has ultra durable three supports nvidia sli as well as AMD crossfire x it uses touch bios to support three terabyte plus drives it also has dual BIOS which enables you to restore the BIOS even if you corrupt it during a flash drive or MOSFETs all ferrite core chokes all lower RDS MOSFETs and all 50000 our Japanese caps mean that even though this is a UD 3 value board it has very high build quality finally up to four times faster performance using Intel SRT technology means that you can install that M SATA SSD get way better performance and you don't actually have to buy a high-capacity SSD for your system let's see if there's anything on the back they have to say for themselves 3x USB power is a great feature it allows you to run a hub or run higher powered devices off of your USB ports it does support USB 3 as well as say 2 3 6 gigabit per second so let's get this baby opened up here's our little guide telling you not to install an 11 56 CPU that's good advice we have a user's manual and i/o shield with color coding as well as a driver DVD which you should throw away and download the latest off 2 gigabyte website Intel Smart Response technology so up to four times faster performance these are this is actually has a basis in reality unlike some manufacturer claims on products yes it does perform way faster using an SSD as a cache then with only a hard drive you've got a multilingual installation guidebook Dolby home theater sticker as well as a powered by gigabyte sticker an SLI connector black flexible my favorite kind as well as two straight and two right angle SATA 360 a bit per second cables here on the motherboard itself we find a motherboard let me try it from the other side yeah there we go ok so let's take it out of the package now this is a value oriented board but high fault high build quality and good features mean that you can actually build a very very decent system we run something like this throw a 2500 K in there Oh give me a sec throw a gigs around in there throw a gtx 560 or an HD 6870 something along those lines you've got a very potent little gaming system so here you can see the power design is a six plus one phase power we've also got a nice little mosfet cooling heatsink up here in terms of the overall layout it's pretty standard you got your LGA 1155 socket supporting core i3 i5 and i7 processors you got your eight pin power in its ideal location up at the top left edge you've got support for dual channel ddr3 memory these are clearly color-coded so you won't install them in the wrong slots your 24-pin power is all along the right-hand edge in it's also ideal location we have eight SATA ports ok so these guys are running off a third party chipset those are SATA 3 six gigabit per second ports these are running off the Intel chipset all six of these the white ones are SATA three six gigabit per second and the blue ones are SATA 2 three gigabits per second and apparently SATA port five will be disabled when the M SATA slot is in use so those are wired up to the same port on the chipset itself in all likelihood here's your front panel connectors here's your front USB three there's the front powered USB two so that can be used to charge tablets even high powered devices we have two more front USB headers front firewire as well as a front audio header in terms of the PCI slot layout we've got a pretty good layout here we've got two PCIe 16x slots although this one is wired only for 8x so if you're running SLI or crossfire you're going to be running at 8 X 8 X speeds we've got two one two three PCIe 1x and 2 PCI now if you install two dual slot cards you're going to be left with one PCI and two-piece ie 1 X slots and here is the M SATA Intel Smart Response technology port here so you just use the little retention clips you plug in an SSD there and you can use that SSD in order to act as a cache for a hard drive that you're using as your system boot drive so that's in some ways a little bit more convenient and a little bit lower profile than actually installing a separate drive running a separate cable and that's kind of more of a hassle than this ok moving along to the back we've got 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 USB 2.0 ports a ps2 keyboard mouse combo port optical audio out firewire HDMI 2 USB 3.0 ports Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio now this HDMI port is very useful because you can use it in order to run lucid virtu which means you can use the onboard video on your CPU for things like transcoding and use the dedicated graphics installed down here for your gaming needs now the fan headers on this particular motherboard we've got our CPU for pin PWM up here we've got a 3 pin right here we've got a 3 pin here a four pin PWM down here and that's pretty much it this is a value board so you tend to see a little bit less in terms of things like fan headers don't forget to check out my or to subscribe to my channel for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos thanks for watching - tech tips