Gigabyte Z68X UD5 B3 Motherboard Preview
Andy Ruffell / 14 years ago
A Closer Look
The box of the Z68X-UD5 B3 is pretty much fully loaded with features with barely any room to breathe. A lot of features are brought over from older Gigabyte technologies whilst Z68 also incorporates some new ones including Touch BIOS and SSD caching, and it seems they wanted to make it clear on the front by packing it full of artwork and various logo’s.
The back is no different with the usual 333 Acceleration being pimped off among the 20 phase power design and all of the other features that this board includes.
Accessories sees the usual set of guides, manuals and a driver installation DVD.
There are also a some included SATA cables (including right-angeled), SLI bridge, case badge stickers and USB 3.0 expansion bracket for the front of your case and are all finished in black and blue. There is also the I/O panel but sadly Gigabyte lost their style flair on that and plumped for a bog standard grey.
The board keeps the styling from the P67-UD7 and decided to go with an all black board and to feature the same passive cooling heatsink design that the UD7 had, but incorporates blue accents instead of the gold that we saw on the P67 based board.
A 20 phase power design is situated around the CPU socket and is cooled by the passive design heatsinks with a number 5 to denote that this is the UD5 motherboard from Gigabyte.
The memory ports following on the styling with black slots which support up to 32GB of DDR3, up to speeds of 2133MHz and also supports Intel XMP modules.
Expansion slots are far from being in short supply, with two legacy PCI slots, an x16 PCIe slot, PCIe x8 slot, PCIe x4 slot and two PCIe x1 slots and due to the way they are spread out nicely, it should give users wanting multiple graphics card configurations a bit of breathing space. The board is able to support both CrossFire and SLI but only CrossFire is able to make use of 3-way graphics, whereas SLI is enabled for 2-way.
The back panel is lit up like a Christmas tree and features many different coloured connectors. The back sees a variety of USB 2.0 and 3.0 connectors, digital SPDIF and Coaxial outputs for audio as well as your analog audio. FireWire is also included in both types, Gigabit LAN, two eSATA ports and a mouse/keyboard PS2 combo port.
I think we can all agree that this board looks very stylish and exciting and we can’t wait to show you the performance from benchmarks and overclocking.
Be sure to check that all out later on eTeknix when we release the review.
This product will be available to purchase from Scan shortly after the launch.
