Gigabyte Z68X UD5 B3 Motherboard Review

Andy Ruffell / 14 years ago

Final Thoughts
It’s always a tough thing to do, concluding a review as it’s all a matter of where to start, and i know the beginning is always a good place, so lets do just that and touch lightly on the styling.

The styling is nothing short of brilliant, giving a sexy, stylish look in all black and featuring those slick blue accents on the edge of the passive cooling design. Gigabyte have really done a good job in the design department and we would just like to give our Kudos to them on that.

The features of the UD5 are nothing short of impressive, giving everything you need and nothing more, unless you count FireWire of course, which as far as we’re concerned, no one needs it, but needs must and all that jazz. There are some features that are new however, and whether they are needed or not, it’s still early days and that’s where our gripes start.

The Touch BIOS is a nice feature but it’s a novel idea and still needs a lot of work. Touch BIOS will be implemented into the proper BIOS at a later date, but for now, it shows a glimpse of what is to offer from a GUI based BIOS interface from Gigabyte, but does have its fair share of problems, but for a new technology i think we may be giving it a bit of a hard time, but criticism of a feature like this is what betters a product as its life goes on.

SSD caching was a real disappointment and frankly was an annoyance for us, but that may just be down to us beind used to SSD’s over HDD’s. The feeling that we have on this feature is quite strong, and that’s because we can see its use, but much like the Touch BIOS, we do think it’s still early days and needs to be fine tuned a bit more to get more performance from it as PCMark Vantage only showed a slight increase in that area, though as said it may excel in real-world performance instead. Whilst we think it is a good idea, we think it may be suited more for a lower end board, as anyone with £225 to splash out on a motherboard like this, has most likely got the money to splash out on a nice RAID 0 setup consisting of two 64GB drives to accompany it, though the shortage of SATA 6G connections is quite upsetting too.

Overall, we love the styling and the performance of the board, but we don’t believe it’s anything too special over the P67-UD7 in terms of features, as the two main features are still very much in a Beta stage in our eyes, but it is all a step in the right direction and it may open more doors in the future, but for now we recommend staying with P67 if you already have it, but if you don’t then it would be stupid not to upgrade to Z68, and the UD5 is a prime example of what can be achieved. Just look at the potential that we unlocked from it!

Due to the view we have on this board, we are rating it as a user buying a system for the first time annd not a user upgrading from P67, as if that were the case it would be gaining a silver award as we don’t see the huge benefit from the P67 platform, but for a new user, it will show you the potential of Sandy Bridge and what it can really do.

VIDEO COMING SOON!

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