A Closer Look
Taking a closer look at the board, there are some interesting things to be seen:
For starters almost all of the USB ports on the rear IO panel are “3x power” ports, meaning that they can put at 1.5 amps at 5v instead of the normal 0.5 amp. This means that high draw chargers for modern phones and tablets can charge more quickly. There are a lot of USB ports back there, should be plenty for everybody!
There’s also a firewire port, gigabit ethernet, S/PDIF, the standard six port audio ports, plus a PS/2 keyboard/mouse port. I’m very happy to see that Gigabyte continues to include a PS/2 port, as it has saved me considerable trouble in the past.
What is not there, despite being based on the Z68 chipset that supports using the integrated GPU on the SandyBridge CPUs is a video output port. You’ll still have to use a dedicated GPU despite being on the Z68 chipset. If you want to use the onboard video you need a Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H board, that H on the end means you get the HDMI output port. In my case this doesn’t matter much as I have a decent stack of GPUs hanging around, but failing to read the fine print on the box could result in issues if you aren’t aware of this. It’s an interesting choice on Gigabyte’s part, I’m not really sure how I feel about it. On one hand no HDMI port means a simpler PCB and hence a cheaper PCB, which they do pass on to the consumers. On the other hand, the warning about not having HDMI (or DVI, or VGA) output could be larger.
As advertised, the CPU power is supplied by “Driver MOS” type mosfets, which include both mosfets of a phase plus the driver for the two mosfets in a single chip. In theory this gives you much higher efficiency (therefor lower heat output and less wasted power), and one Driver MOS phase is the same as quite a few normal phases. Towards the left you can see a couple of normal phases, then there are four Driver MOS phases as well, two under the heatsink and two down and to the right without heatsinks.
My guess is that we’re seeing four Driver MOS phases for the main CPU power supply (vcore), and then one normal phase each for the System Agent voltage (vccsa) and the CPU IO voltage (vccio/vtt), as the vccsa and vccio don’t use nearly as much power as the CPU itself does. The mosfets for vccio and vccsa are the Low RDS(on) type, they waste far less power and run much cooler than normal mosfets, though still more than the Driver MOS types.
Here we have the SATA ports, the four blue ones are the 3Gb/s ports from the Z68 chipset, the two white ones are 6Gb/s also from the Z68 chipset, and the two gray ports are also 6Gb/s, but from the Marvel controller. The six on the left can all be used for RAID, though if you use both 6Gb/s and 3Gb/s you will not get full 6Gb/s performance.
Also visible is the nice large PCH heatsink for the Z68 chipset, it’s overkill really as the PCH doesn’t put out much heat, but I’d far rather have overkill than underkill! Plus it looks pretty cool. It’s a very low profile heatsink, there won’t be any issues with GPUs or other PCIe cards running into it.
On the non-visible feature end of things there are two major features, one that comes with the Z68 chipset and one that is unique to this Gigabyte motherboard.
All Z68 boards should be able to use something called Intel Smart Response Technology, it lets you use a small SSD as an extended cache for your mechanical hard drive, greatly speeding hard drive access times. This Gigabyte Z68X-UD3-B3 is no exception. Unfortunately I don’t have a SSD to test this with. The next level up of Gigabyte Z68 motherboards from this one have a socket for a small mSATA SSD, and some gigabyte boards actually come with a SSD pre-installed! Sadly, this isn’t one of ’em.
A feature unique to Gigabyte is their “Touch Bios”, it allows you use a graphical interface in windows to adjust bios settings. It’s a rather interesting concept, and after playing with it a bit I like it. There isn’t anything you can do in Touch Bios that you cannot do in the main bios, but what Touch Bios does allow is editing your bios while you have a webpage with an overclocking guide open, or something else along those lines. You do have to reboot for settings to take effect however.
Gigabyte also includes their EasyTune6 software which lets you adjust the bclk and multiplier(s) in windows, those settings take effect immediately (you have to enable OS Multiplier Adjustment in BIOS before you can adjust the multiplier on the fly, bclk adjustment is always possible immediately). It’s a very nice way to work on your overclock, and absolutely crucial to finding the outer reaches of performance if you’re a bencher like me.
Now, on to performance!
