Gigabyte Z68X UD5 B3 Motherboard Review
Andy Ruffell / 14 years ago
A Closer Look
The board follows on from the P67 platform and includes the new sexy black style from Gigabyte that we saw on the UD7. By featuring black colours and being bold it adds to the extreme look and shows that this board means business. It also makes the board like very valuable, whereas some users felt the blue that Gigabyte used to use was tacky and very cheap looking.
As expected, the ATX form factor is used on this board and the layout is very similar to the UD7 once again. Even down to the passive cooling design which features the same colour scheme, albeit with blue accents as opposed to gold.
The CPU socket still allows the use of 1156 style coolers and have sufficient room for bigger style coolers that are on the market. A 20 phase power design is used which provides ample power for even the most extreme conditions and we know that this board can take us to 5GHz easily.
Memory support on this board includes up to 32GB of DDR3 in dual channel and accepts speeds from 1066MHz all the way upto 2133MHz and due to this, we thought that it would only be fitting to use some Kingston DDR3 2133MHZ memory for our testing of this board. The colour scheme also follows on to the memory modules and looks very stylish in black. The memory support on this board also caters for Intel XMP based memory, much like the Kingston memory we’re testing with and therefore setup is quick and easy.
The passive design of the cooling shows us the Ultra Durable branding and helps to disperse heat around the board through a series of heatsinks and heatpipes.
Gigabyte branding is also featured on the passive cooling
The board has the usual front panel connectors but also includes a huge amount of system fan headers and native USB 3.0 headers for use with your front panel case connectors, or the bundled USB 3.0 accessory. A redundant FireWire header is also included, but personally is a waste in our opinion.
If like us, you have a fear of cases, or you just don’t see the need for them, Gigabyte have made this board with you in mind, and includes a power button, reset button and CMOS reset switch.
Being a UD5 board, we would consider this as a board that sits quite close to the hig-end market, though we see a lack of SATA 6G ports, and sadly this board only features two, whereas the other four are the slightly slower and older SATA 3G connectors.
The rear I/O panel has a few USB 3.0 ports as more devices than ever are using this newer, faster interface. This is all taken care of by the NEC D720200 chip which sits nicely next to the Realtek audio chip just above it.
The box made a mistake and states this board has 3-way SLI support, but that feature is set aside for the UD7, though CrossFireX in 3-way is supported, only 2-way SLI is capable with this board. Expansion slots are in the masses still and include two legacy PCI slots, 2 PCIe x1 slots, a PCIe x16 slot, a PCIe x8 slot and a PCI x4 slot of which all are nicely spread apart for better airflow when using multiple graphics cards in an SLI or CrossFire setup.
The rear panel looks like a rainbow threw up on it with purples, greens blues and reds among other colours. This is especially handy for the novice users though and shows the relevant USB 2.0 ports in red, FireWire in yellow and USB 3.0 and eSATA ports in blue. Other features include digital SPDIF, Coaxial, Gigabit LAN and analog audio as well as a legeacy PS2 mouse/keyboard combo port.
