Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the z68 XP you d3p from gigabyte this is a very value oriented motherboard in terms of the price but a very performance and the looks and just generally awesome oriented motherboard when you have a look at the features that are included which are all of the z68 features and let's go through them so the first one is easy Smart Response which is a gigabyte exclusive patent-pending Asterix Asterix cltd whatever the case may be basically what that means is it is a really easy way to use Intel SRT or Smart Response technology which allows you to take a large affordable hard drive and cache it improve the performance of it with a small affordable SSD it works really well everyone who can't afford an SSD for their system because the capacity that they need is just like oh well then I can't afford that capacity I just won't get one do this instead touch BIOS so hybrid EFI technology allows three terabyte plus hard drives ok 60% ok yeah yeah ready for Intel's next gen 22 nanometer CPUs very cool okay so that's Ivy Bridge ready for native PCI Express gen3 so upcoming graphics cards that won't be around for a while but there you go supports it driver MOSFETs three times USB power which is a great feature allows you to charge more devices or power more devices through a hub 12 phase power design on the board itself and here's all those e68 features so Intel HD graphics if you don't want to put in a dedicated graphics card quick sync which allows you to use the dedicated graphics and an integrated graphics card in order to get great gaming performance and great video encoding performance lucid virtu that's the switchable graphics that allows you to do that and support for intel's k series overclocking let me see if I'm missing anything else on this very complicated and full looking box I don't think so so let's have a look at what's included we've got an HDMI to DVI adapter these are handy we have an i/o shield which is helpfully color-coded aha flexible black SLI bridge my very favorite kind we have four SATA cables so to our right angle and two of them are straight we have a user's manual including a driver DVD don't use this download the latest from the gigabyte website as well as a guide for Smart Response technology which you probably won't need a guide for because it's so easy with the gigabyte utility multilingual installation guidebook I actually have a video about that on my NCIX comm channel so you can feel free to check that out and I show you how to install SRT technology using the gigabyte utility which is basically you download the exe to your desktop and then you run it yeah really it's that easy although I have had people ask me so do you install the OS initially to the hard drive and the answer is yes you do and then you add the SSD later alright so let's look at the layout of the board overall it's a very slick looking all blackboard so we've got almost nothing on here that's not black or white or silver or Chrome or some sort of shade in between we've got yeah no that's white we've got a little blue accents on some of the capacitors but look how nice that looks guys alright so there's our LGA 1155 socket compatible at the latest core i3 Core i5 and core i7 CPUs we've got a nice beefy power design which I do not expect to see normally on a UD 3 class board this is more like what I'd expect to see on a UD 4 or UD 5 class aboard but gigabytes really gone all out on this one we've got our 8 pin power connector in its ideal location and the top left I'll go through fan headers later we've got pretty beefy looking cooling but they are attached by plastic pegs so be a little bit careful with those when you're taking them out of the box just make sure you got good contact between the MOSFETs and the heat sinks and then you shouldn't have too much to worry about we've got four ddr3 dimms slots supporting dual channel memory we've got our 24-pin connector in its ideal location along the right-hand edge gigabyte SATA ports are right here so those are powered by a third-party chipset if you're running SATA 3 drives I would highly recommend you stick with the two Intel powered ones which are right here and then you've also got 4 SATA 2 connectors to go along with those so total of 8 SATA connectors our chipset heatsink is right here nice and low profile so you're not going to have any problems with graphics cards being interfered with we've got our front panel connector our TPM we've got front USB 3 right about here front high powered USB - so that's for charging your iPad or other tablet with the included utility one two more front panel USB 2 ports we've got front firewire front audio and then we've got what looks like a fairly ideal setup so three PCIe 1x of which two of them will be available when you install a dual slot graphics card to PCI of which one will be available when you install a dual slot graphics card so that gives you room for one two three more devices in addition to your SLI or crossfire graphics cards and you can have one PCI and two PCIe 1x on the back of the board we find almost nothing except you can see that that chips that you think may be due to its size is affixed by screws so that's nice to see on the back we've got one two three four five six seven eight USB 2.0 ports one of those ps2 mouse keyboard combo ports optical audio out HDMI out that is what gives you the ability to use lucid virtu and Intel Quick Sync technology and then we've got two USB 3.0 ports Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out don't forget also you know what I think they even mention this on the box I can't believe they didn't mention that what's being here somewhere yeah there it is okay dual BIOS yeah don't forget about dual BIOS dual BIOS is awesome because it means that if your BIOS gets pooched you can actually restore to the other BIOS chip no problem so that's a very convenient feature makes it so that you are less likely to brick a gigabyte board with a BIOS flash than anything that doesn't have dual BIOS thank you for checking out my video don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos