Review: P67 is sooooo yesterday! This board is all about the future, and that means Z68.
Perhaps it’s just us, but we never did understand the reasoning behind having separate chipsets for P67 and H67 functionality. The former unleashes the power of the ‘K’ series processors, by allowing overclocking and high speed memory. The latter cannot be overclocked and is limited to 1333MHz memory, but can tap into the on-die GPU. Why can’t we overclock and have an active on-die graphic processing unit concurrently? Whatever Intel’s reasoning, the solution has finally arrived, and it comes in the form of the Z68 chipset!
The Z68 chipset isn’t just a hybrid product of its existing siblings, it brings to the table a nifty feature – SSD caching. This involves automatically moving commonly accessed data from a HDD onto a high speed (typically low capacity) SSD drive. What this achieves is a good mix between cost effectiveness and performance, something that neither HDDs nor SSDs are capable of individually.
Gigabyte’s strategy regarding the new chipset is to completely replace P67. This makes sense, why support two chipsets when one is a crippled clone of the other? And this is where the Z68X-UD3H-B3 comes into play as GIGABYTE’s new low-end Sandy Bridge board.
We’re suckers for sleek design. To see a simple matte black motherboard without flashy heatsinks is a wonderful thing, and to see it on what’s considered a cost effective model is very welcome. The layout is tidy, and if you have low-profile memory, you can whack in massive air coolers without encountering problems.
You won’t get handy onboard controls with this board, but there’s plenty of connectivity. Four USB 2.0, two USB 3.0 on the back panel, HDMI, DisplayPort, D-Sub, DVI-D, 3Gb/s eSATA, plus the usual 7.1 channel 3.5mm TRS audio jacks.
The retro-styled EFI setup can be accessed via a new feature named ‘Touch BIOS’. For those with touch screens this means you can overclock with a press or two of your finger, via Windows. We’re sure that all three people with touch screens and a will to fiddle with their setup are thrilled right now! On a more serious note, one new feature we absolutely love is the warning when booting in IDE mode with an AHCI capable HDD. This is a common cause of BSOD during overclocking, particularly after clearing the CMOS.
Unfortunately we didn’t get a retail package, so we can’t tell you if it comes with any goodies. We hypothesise that it’ll be similar to the P67A-UD3-B3.
Our initial overclocking attempt had us worried. With a voltage of 1.5v in the BIOS and Level 3 LLC (out of a total of 10 levels of LLC), CPU-Z reported a voltage of 1.1v idle and fluctuation between 1.27v and 1.6v during Prime95! Experience dictates that this is far from normal, even if it isn’t a board aimed at enthusiasts. After contacting overclocker extraordinaire Dino from GIGABYTE, we determined the fault lied with CPU-z itself, as you’d expect when using software with brand new hardware. And for the record, his recommendation is Level 5 LLC on this particular model.
Our first attempt at overclocking the Intel 2600K hit a hard wall at 4.8GHz stable at a voltage of 1.5v and Level 3 LLC. We could boot at 5GHz, but Prime95 would cause an immediate reboot upon starting a Blend test. We then tried increasing the LLC to level 5 but had similar issues. It turns out that you must increase the PWM and current protection settings to get a stable 5GHz – we crudely raised them as far as they could go. In the end we settled with 1.5v to get our 5GHz. With tweaking, it should be possible to reduce that voltage further.
To our surprise, the Z68X-UD3H edges ahead of the ASUS Sabertooth in PiFast and wPrime with the same configuration (possibly due to small BCLK discrepancies). There’s no doubt that this board is a capable of overclocking and performing to a high degree. You probably won’t break records on it, but that’s a high expectation from a budget board.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012