As with other boards in the budget segment, we find a full-sized ATX board with a brown PCB and blue colour scheme. The slots and connectors all feature a different type of blue which really makes the board stand out and overall the board doesn’t look over-complicated and the various aspects are spaced out nicely. There is one passive heatsink present, which covers the Z68 chipset and features a shiny blue and black Asus branded colour scheme.
The CPU socket area is extremely open to breath and doesn’t feature any type of cooling, active or passive. The MOSFETS and VRM areas are completely bare allowing for the best airflow and space around the CPU. Obviously this all cuts down on cost, but does provide extra room where needed the most.
Memory wise we find four slots (two blue and two black) that support up to 32GB of DDR3 1066/1333/1600/1866 (OC)/2133 (OC)/2200 (OC) and also supports Intel XMP memory modules.
Taking a look at the expansion slots, we find two PCI-Express x1 slots, a single PCI-Express x16 slot, a single PCI-Express x16 slot that runs at x4 speeds and three legacy PCI slots. The board also supports CrossFireX technology from AMD through use of the two x16 slots, even though one runs at at x4 speeds which obviously cuts down the costs of this board quite dramatically.
Front panel headers include the usual suspects including a COM port header, four sets of USB 2.0 headers, TPU switch, CLRTC jumper and the typical front panel LED and switches header.
The SATA ports are all orientated singually instead of stacked as we’d expect. There are six in total of which four are blue and support SATA 3Gb/s speeds and two grey ports which support SATA 6Gb/s speeds. All SATA ports provide support for RAID 0, 1,5 and 10 and this board also includes Intel’s Smart Response Technology.
Though this is a budget board, we find a nice selection on the rear I/O with a PS2 combo port, four USB 2.0 ports, optical SPDIF, HDMI, VGA and DVI, Gigabit LAN powered by Realtek, six audio jacks powered once again by Realtek and two USB 3.0 ports. This all goes to show that nothing was skimped on here when thinking about what the end user would want from their system.
I've read in a few places that overclocking isn't as easy as you make it sound, due to not being able to manually set voltages, only being able to use +/- offsets. What was your experience with this? I plan on getting a 2500k with potentially this board, but if it is going to cause some issues I might spend the extra $50 for the non-LX version.
I am running this just now and there is no problem overclocking at all. I am no overclocker so the one hit button and it does it all is great, for the enthusiast you can also delve deeper in to the voltages etc. To be honest it's a great board well worth a look and for the price it's great value for money. I am running 2500K and it sits at 4.5Ghz with only air cooling and that was the one hit button affair. Can you ask for more right now, nah i doubt it. Good luck