Gadgetory

today I'll be unboxing the gigabyte z68 X ud3 hb3 so this has most of the features you have come to expect from gigabyte including touch BIOS hybrid EFI technology which allows you to use three terabyte plus hard drives a three year warranty in the US and Canada ultra durable three it's got nvidia sli ambi crossfire and it supports all the latest intel core i3 i5 and i7 processors on LGA 1155 let's look around on the back of the board and have a look if they have anything else to say for themselves yes we've got dual BIOS which allows you to restore it to the other physical BIOS chip even if you corrupt the BIOS during a flash we have 3x USB power allows you to charge more powerful devices and run more powered devices off a hub than you can on competing motherboards we have USB 3 SE the 3 6 gigabit per second and driver MOSFETs which reduces mounting area by 50% apparently interesting the onboard audio foods a 108 decibels sound to noise ratio and that is definitely a good thing more sound less noise always a plus we have 4 SATA cables included 2 straight to right angle we have an i/o shield which has convenient color coding on it we have a little warning telling you not to put a socket 1156 cpu in this board and we have an SLI cable next we have a user's manual with a useless utility DVD download the latest off the gigabyte website to make sure you have the latest versions finally a Dolby home theater sticker and a multilingual installation guidebook next we have the board itself which has phone look at that never seen foam on a motherboard like that before and I'm not even being facetious I have never seen foam mounted on a motherboard like that so let's go ahead and find out why it has foam take that out Oh beautiful motherboard especially far like a value price point board so there you go that is - I'm gonna go ahead and guess prevent the MOSFET heatsink from moving around during shipping there you go because it does use plastic pushpins so while those are not a risk while the board is stationary while it's being moved around yeah it could loosen the bond between the thermal compound and the MOSFETs themselves so let's have a look at the overall layout of this guy right here we're gonna start with our 1155 socket in the middle of the board so that's where you put your CPU then we're gonna move on to our looks like one two two five six plus one phase power design we've got our eight pin connector in the top left of the board in its ideal location we've got our dual channel ddr3 RAM over here on the side and our 24 pin connector also in its ideal location we've got seven SATA ports so this is say two three six gigabit per second right here is say two three six gigabits per second and we've got three SATA - three gigabit per second so this one's running off the Intel chipset this one's running off a third-party chipset these ones are going to be your higher performing ones and these are your fallbacks the last SATA port is going to be on the back panel of the motherboard and I'm a big fan of that running Intel off the Intel chipset because it can be more convenient for raid configurations here our front panel connectors as well as our front USB 3.0 firewire powered front USB remember you can charge a tablet off the one with the red background and then one two three more front USB headers in terms of the PCI slot layout we've got one two three PCI 1 X 2 PCI 16 X although this one is only wired electrically to 8 X and 2 PCI slots this is a very very solid layout because it's going to give you two PCI One X and one PCI left if you install two dual slot cards on the back here we've got a variety of good features remember this is a z68 motherboard so we have video out including VGA DVI HDMI and DisplayPort yes everything is supported we've got one two three four USB 2.0 ports one of those ps2 keyboard mouse combo ports optical audio out firewire eSATA off the Intel chipset two USB 3.0 ports and Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio out so I would say an ideal type configuration for a motherboard like this is making sure that you've bought a nice decent quad-core CPU I mean if you're going to get the z6 a chipset you might as well go for a quad-core this is a high-end chipset also you're going to want to put most people aren't going to be running SLI or crossfire on a board like this solo you will have the options maybe go with a value board like our value part like a good bang for I shouldn't say value because they're still expensive but a bang for the buck card like a GTX 560 or a Radeon 68 70 something along those lines Ram is so cheap these days so I probably throw me eight gigs of RAM I throw an SSD in here remember this board supports lucid virtu so you can use the onboard video here out the onboard video here and still use your dedicated graphics for games but you can use this one to do video transcoding and it also supports Intel SRT technology so you can take a sixty gigas SD even a safe a 3:1 throw it on the SATA 3 port and then throw a big hard drive like a WD black on one of the other ports in order to use the SSD as a cache for awesome performance without blowing a bunch of money on 120 or 240 gig SSD thank you for checking out my unboxing don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos