Gigabyte Z68X UD5 B3 Motherboard Review

After looking at the P67-UD7 board from Gigabyte, we were left with a feeling of excitement and joy knowing that we had a fantastic product at our disposal, and we assumed that nothing better could come along. Whilst that feeling was great, it was also short lived quite quickly.

Z68 arrived within days before the launch spouting new features from every angle, but keeping the essence of everything that was P67. We managed to get our hands on the Z68X-UD5 that we’re looking at today, which resembles the P67 platform very closely, but offers up a couple of new features too.

The Z68 platform as a whole offers SSD caching as one of the new features, allowing users to accelerate a standard mechanical hard drive by using the addition of a small capacity SSD for caching. This is said to return up to 4 times more performance than the hybrid drives that are on the market today. Another feature that the Z68 has enabled on the Gigabyte boards is Touch BIOS giving users a GUI based interface to work from that even a novice user could use.

Whilst this all sounds very good, the paper still shows this board as being P67 based, and leaves us wondering if it gives any significant performance increase or whether it’s just a glorified sales pitch to enable these new features that only a handful of users will really make use of.

Let’s find out and put the Z68X-UD5 under the microscope.

Specifications
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• Socket 1155
• Z68 Chipset
• ATX Form Factor
• 1 x PCIe x16
• 1 x PCIe x8
• 2 x PCI
• 1 x PCIe x4
• 2 x PCIe x1
• 2 Channel memory
• 4 DIMM slots
• Support up to DDR3 2133MHz
• Up to 32GB memory support
• 10 x USB 2.0
• 8 x USB 3.0
• 2 x SATA3
• 4 x SATA2
• RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support
• ALC889 with Dolby audio
• 1394 FireWire
• Gigabit LAN