The Box, The Accessories, The Board
The box is a standard gigabyte affair, it lists the wide array of features for this board. Inside there are four blue SATA cables, the rear IO plate, a driver CD, a manual, a quick start guide, a “don’t put the wrong CPU in” warning and a SLI bridge. Plus, of course, the motherboard itself down below in it’s own protected spot.
As you can see, this Gigabyte Z68X-UD3-B3 motherboard uses the classic gigabyte blue theme rather than the black or black/gold theme on their new top end boards. What this signifies I don’t know, but I prefer the blue myself. The board has plenty of extra IO ports down on the bottom edge, along with very well marked connectors for the power/reset buttons and LEDs. Gigabyte does a much better job on this section than most manufacturers.
The network controller is lined up with the first PCIe slot, care must be taken not to damage the small surface mount components while installing video cards. If you’re careful it won’t be an issue, but if you start slamming things around you’re going to run into trouble.
A very cool feature are the dual PCIe slots, the slot closest to the CPU is a 16x, the one further away is 8x. If you use both slots the first slot drops to 8x to provide the 8x bandwidth to the second slot. This gives much better performance for dual-GPU setups than the more standard 16x / 4x setup most other motherboards in this price range use.
Lastly, in the first picture you can see the dual bios chips, this gives you a known-good backup bios profile in case you explore the bios and adjust something you shouldn’t.
The CPU socket area is nice and clean, this will be a very easy board to insulate for extreme cooling, as well as being nice and easy to install an aftermarket heatsink on. Thanks gigabyte!
You can also see the ram slots, to run your memory in Dual Channel mode (you want to!) you need to put memory sticks in the two white slots or the two blue slots or all four. If you put one stick in each color or an odd number of sticks you’ll be stuck with single channel mode.
