Gadgetory

this is a couple of things first it is an exciting new gigabyte motherboard second it is an exciting new Intel chipset so this is the same Intel LGA 1155 platform that supports the latest Intel Core i7 core i5 core i3 processors it is made by gigabyte who we know and love okay has 16 phases of power 3-year warranty ultra durable three all those big gigabyte technologies we like nvidia sli dual CPU power interesting power engine a and power engine be cool but it has a really cool new feature this uses the Zed 68 chipset so this is the Zen 68 x UD for v3 what that means is that even if you install ok get this a PCI Express graphics card or even to an SLI or crossfire X which is compatible with both you can still use the onboard video on your Intel CPU because they've all got it on the LGA 1155 platform to accelerate things like video rendering cool right so that is the pretty much of the killer app that makes the Z 68 different from the P 67 chipset so let's take just a brief moment here talk about some of the other gigabyte technologies that make this board special so USB power 3x is a pretty cool one actually here I'm just gonna cheat and with them phone box USB power 3x so what that means is you can deliver more power through the USB ports than their competitors USB 3.0 is awesome love it SATA 3 also awesome love it ok all ferrite core chokes all lower RDS MOSFETs and all $50,000 Japanese solid caps as I mentioned before at 16 phase power and let me see 3 plus terabyte hard drives all in this touch barroso gigabyte has implemented UEFI BIOS technology now with this line of board so I don't think there's much here on the back that we really need to talk about there is one more killer feature of these e68 but I'm gonna talk about it in a little while I'm just gonna that's a hook so you guys can't go away just yet ok multilingual installation guidebook user manual driver download the latest off the gigabyte website don't install LGA 1156 CPUs they are not compatible here is an IO shield oh and the ones with three times USB power are marked neat we have ooh black flexible sli bridge I love little touches like this where they include you know cuz the last thing we want is you know you got like a schmuck see you know great color scheme board and then they go and include like a brown SLI bridge it's like that's great I went and built a high-performance system and this and now it has to look stupid so you've got two right angles SATA cables two straight SATA cables also black to match the entirely black appearance and this high-performance z68 motherboard so let's go ahead and get this baby out of the packaging here and there it is now if you guys ever watch my line is tech tips show and you ever pay attention you might remember one thing that I always talk about first whenever I see it and that is matte black PCD love it not everything about it it looks great it makes you feel like you just bought a really premium quality product when it has that stealth black look to it you know it's not overly shiny although there are accented shiny bits like the CPU socket the battery but other than that it's just got like a dark stealthy look to it love it okay so let's start with the CPU socket as I mentioned before LGA 1155 socket fully capable of using the full capabilities of the CPU you put in it including the CPU cores as well as the GPU core even when you install another graphics card so all the p67 all the age 67 boards as soon as you install a graphics card boom turns off the onboard video you can't use Intel's accelerated video encoding software so that is a great feature to have for this chipset there is that 21st either 16 phase power design so you can see all of the phases here you can see the MOSFET coolers are very bulky very heat very capable looking okay you can see they're going to get some incidental airflow from your CPU fan no matter how you situate it up here in the top right top left corner this ideal location is the eight pin CPU power connector here is our CPU fan connector over here we find four ddr3 dimms slots alright so those are dual channel this is the same basic technology we find on the p67 with that onboard video inclusion to the technology list here we have our 24-pin connector in its ideal location here we find two gigabyte chipset powered SATA three ports to Intel chipset powered SATA 3 ports as well as for Intel chipset powered SATA to three gigabit per second ports so these are going to be the best ones I'd use these ones next and then probably I'd fall back on to those ones unless you have a bunch of SATA three six gigabit per second drives in which case I guess you'll need to use these second here we have our front panel connectors here we have front USB three here we have one two three front USB twos here we have front firewire front audio and it's ideal location along the bottom edge of the board not over here like previous generation gigabyte boards in terms of expansion ports we have two PCIe 16x slots although you can clearly see this one is only wired for 8x so if you do run crossfire or SLI you're gonna be running an 8 X 8 X mode which doesn't make very much difference in terms of performance 2 PCIe 1x 2 PCI so if you do install SLI or crossfire with 2 dual slot cards you will be left with one PCIe 1x M one PCI slot for expansion here on the back of the board you will find a whole lot of expansion possibilities so first things first we've got one of those ps2 keyboard mouse combo ports which I'm a big fan of we have one two three four five six seven eight USB 2.0 ports coaxial and optical audio out firewire that is powered eSATA hold on I think that's powered eSATA let's find out nope that is eSATA 3o e SATA 3 really oh cool well that's a neat feature hold on in just a minute here well you know what someone leave a comment on the video let me know if that is actually a SATA 3 port because that's pretty neat for external storage if it is so that is an eSATA 3 / USB combo port and then this one is just a straight East out of 3 here's USB 3.0 Gigabit Ethernet as well as 7.1 audio out and actually you know what it's kind of funny but I like the this is almost like harkening back to the old gigabyte days where their boards had like explosion of color on them here the board looks awesome which is great so it means your systems gonna look great and then at the back 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 know old-school style we've got just a little bit of that gigabyte flare on the back of the system where it's I don't have to look at it unless I'm trying to plug in a port in which case color coding everything helps a lot was great now I haven't talked about that other feature yet I've been saving it and let's see what Intel Smart Response technology is what we're calling it so basically what Intel Smart Response technology allows us to do as it allows us to plug in an SSD into one of the Intel ports and in the hard drive and then use the SSD as a cache so we've had products that have used this kind of technology in the past such as the Seagate Momentis XT which had a built in very small SSD such as the HDD boost from silverstone which allowed you to mount an SSD and then use a pass-through to run to a hard drive but this is the first time we've seen it natively included on a chipset so the Z 68 chipset has the graphics feature which is very very important and then it also has the ability to use an SSD as a cache for your hard drive so what that means is if you buy a small SSD rather than installing your OS installing one game on it and then going oh where'd all my space go now I can't put anything else on my SSD instead you put on the SSD it hides itself from you completely you plug in your hard drive 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 the full capacity of your hard drive and then the system will intelligently store your most frequently accessed files and programs onto the SSD so you can more quickly access those gigabyte claims to a 4-time system performance increase then with hard drive only so that's very cool thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Z 68 x UD 4 B 3 from gigabyte don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos