Verdict and Conclusion
This Gigabyte Z68X-UD3-B3 motherboard impressed me, it’s current price on newegg is $145, placing it on the less expensive end of LGA1155 motherboards. Despite the attractively low price tag it performs extremely well and overclocks my 2600K very nicely indeed. Combine low price and high performance and you have an excellent value!
The Driver Mosfets appear to do an excellent job of things, generally if you see a motherboard with only four phases for CPU power you’ll have mosfets that run very hot and may limit the overclocking capabilities of the board. In this case the four Driver Mosfets run cool to the touch even under sustained full load conditions, the heatsink that covers two Driver Mosfets as well as the VCCSA and VCCIO power phases doesn’t heat up much at all either, it’s only faintly warm to the touch.
The performances and efficiency of the board impressed me as well, it is an excellent performer!
I would have liked to be able to test the Intel Smart Response Technology that allows you to use a small SSD to greatly speed up your hard drive performance, but I lack a SSD to use for testing. That said, it’s a feature of the Z68 chipset rather then just this board, testing done by fellow reviewers on this technology is likely to apply to this board as well.
The Touch Bios is a cool feature, especially when combined with the backup bios chip in case you set something that perhaps you shouldn’t have.
The only real competition in this price range for these features comes from Gigabyte itself, with the Z68A-D3H. That board lacks some of the power handling capability as well as not having the double thick 2oz/square foot copper layers. In my opinion the price of $145 for this Z68X-UD3-B3 is about right.
My primary gripe with this board is not really even with the board at all, but with the box it comes in. The box has three different small print sections, one for Touch Bios warning that you have to download the software rather than it being on the DVD (disguised as underlining “EFI Technology”, one for the LowRDS(on) mosfets, warning that they only mean for power switching use (undisguised), and lastly one for the lack of support for the iGPU built in to all LGA1155 CPUs (next to the Intel Z68 Express chipset decal, a logical place though not one often looked at given the huge “Z68X” printed across the box).
The lack of iGPU support is a minor issue as well, I’d have liked to see support for the iGPU on the board, or a slightly lower price. The box issues and lack of iGPU support despite being a Z68 chipset cost the board a bit over half a point, resulting in a still excellent score of 9.4/10!
Winston’s comments: Once again Gigabyte have delivered yet another great all-rounder, offering performance that’s well balanced at a price that’s quite had to beat. What’s more, thanks to Bobnova’s overclocking skills, we were able to use the Gigabyte Z68X-UD3-B3 to overclock the Core i7-2600K to a whopping 4693MHz!
9.4/10
