Gigabyte Z68X UD7 B3 Motherboard Review

One of the first motherboards we received after the Sandy Bridge launch the Gigabyte P67A-UD7 and we almost instantly fell in love with the board.  Sadly were we unable to get the review posted before the worldwide chipset recall but we did spend a considerable amount of time tweaking and tuning the board and even posted some very impressive numbers for the HWBot team. 

With the release of the Gigabyte Z68X-UD7 we wondered if the new chipset would actually bring new features, or was simply a revision update.  After testing we discovered no significant difference between the boards which begs the question, Do we care?  For an enthusiast overclocker the use of onboard graphics is often regarded as a worthless waste of space so using the graphical features of the Z68 is not required.  We're also uncertain if the Lucid Virtu features would be compatible with the NF200 anyway.

Intel Smart Response is not supported natively like on some Gigabyte Z68 motherboards but can be enabled using one of the available SATA connections.  We would have liked to see that feature on the UD7 but given the cost and complexity of this motherboard it is likely best we handle that feature on our own

Performance was what we had expected from a motherboard of this caliber, some of the benchmark results were lower than expected due to the out of box configuration.  As expected these numbers improved with some basic tuning and overclocking response was excellent.

24 Phase PWM
3-Way SLI Support
Full Featured Motherboard
Black and Gold Color Scheme
Dual Gigabit LAN
2oz Copper PCB

Limited benefit over P67A design