Following our earlier preview, let's take a full look at the latest motherboard from Gigabyte, the Z68X UD5 B3.



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Looks ok, but a bit expensive, nice review though.

nice mobo - but for the price i would rather have a sabertooth

Not as impressive as I thought it was going to be but as said it's not a bad motherboard. Z68, apart from the addition of SSD caching doesn't really seem worth it tbh, I know some of the boards offer the use of the IGP but if you are spending over £150+ on a motherboard it seems a waste to use the IGP and not a proper GPU.

With the IGP you also get the Lucid chip (on some boards) and the ability to overclock the CPU where as on H67 you only get use of the IGP which can be overclocked but no CPU overclocking and P67 no use of the IGP and only CPU overclocking.

Combining the use of the IGP and being able to overclock both IGP and CPU is good, but again if you are spending money on a decent motherboard i'd say it's best to go with P67 with a proper GPU or a high end Z68 motherboard with a proper GPU. The SSD caching is good but i would like to see the tech mature a bit to see what it is fully capable of on future motherboards.

Good review anyway Bryan

the igp can also be used for encoding

ive seen mediashow espresso 6 benchmarks that show it encoding twice as fast then a gtx 560 ti

I read about that in this months Custom PC, not about the 560s but the igp. You can only use it on boards with the Lucid chip though but still it's a good feature to have. You can also switch between using you GPU to using the IGP or you can use it to boost the performance of the GPU, on the Asus boards with the Lucid chip anyway.

Also in Intels key notes at CES they showed the Quick Sync encoding being faster than a 580 .

i thought all the z68 boards have that lucid virtu stuff on them

damn the quick sync must be really optimized for encoding

considering a gtx560ti or anything higher completely destroys it in gaming

Not all of them have it, the higher end Gigabyte ones don't anyway. The Asus P8Z68 VPRO does, not sure about the MSI ones, the lower end ones do but I haven't looked at them all so I don't know whether they all do.

I haven't seen Quick Sync in action apart from the Intel keynotes at CES where it encoded a vid faster than a 580, by a fair bit as well.

oh you mean the video outputs on the mobo? yea higher ends dont but cant they still do the dGPU thing where they plug monitor into graphics card but still use quicksync features

iGPU is when you plug into the motherboard and it allows it to idle on intels video instead of graphics card for more power saving

I thought only the ones with the video output had the Lucid chip. The Gigabyte Z68 UD5 and Z68 UD7 don't have video outs or the Lucid chip and you can't use IGP on those so you wouldn't be able to use quick Sync.

I think the boards with the video outs have the Lucid chip but the ones without don't, so on the ones with out I don't think you can use it because you would need the Lucid chip to be able to use the IGP and Quick Sync.

just checked gigabyte site your right only their lower end ones can use the virtu software... i didnt know there was any hardware (lucid chip) involved thats why i figured any z68 could do it....well that sucks (for people who wanna encode or use the power saving features) and it kinda limits z68 too, now the only added feature is ssd caching