GIGABYTE Z68X UD4 Review

👤by David Mitchelson  Comments 📅11-05-11

Introduction

Product on Review: GIGABYTE Z68X-UD4
Manufacturer and Sponsor: GIGABYTE
Street Price: £170 inc. VAT (At time of review)

GIGABYTE are one of the biggest names in the world of graphics and motherboards and it is to them that we turn for our first look at the new Intel Z68 chipset. There has been a lot of speculation surrounding this new chipset. Questions that would query whether it would offer any credible benefits over the P67 chipset. Feature-wise, Z68 isn’t going to bring any ground-breaking features with it. Except for GIGABYTE’s offerings – many boards will be featuring video outputs. GIGABYTE have chosen not to incorporate this as they believe those investing in a board of each of the UDX class would be wanting to supply their own GPU power, especially as the boards offer SLI and CrossfireX. I can see their point.

So what do we get from GIGABYTE if the video outputs aren’t present? Well with the Z68 chipset we have the new Touch BIOS, SSD caching and we have been told – better overclocking. So today we will be putting the Z68-UD4 on our test bench and putting it through its paces within synthetic and gaming benchmarks in order to reveal to our readers whether there is any great advantage of moving to this new chipset over P67.

A little bit about GIGABYTE

GIGABYTE was founded in 1986 in a small lab by four young engineers passionate to make their mark on the industry. GIGABYTE remains dedicated to the core belief of improving the lives of our users by manufacturing products that are high-performing, reliable, and of excellent quality. Here are some of GIGABYTE’s innovation highlights:

G1-Killer Gaming Motherboard (2011): World’s most advanced weapon for elite gamers.

USB 3.0 (2010): First motherboard manufacturer to release motherboards with USB 3.0 support.

Ultra Durable™ Technology: First motherboard manufacturer to implement the following technologies: All solid Japanese capacitors (2006), Ferrite Core Chokes and Low RDS(on) MOSFETs (2007), Dynamic Energy Saver (2007), 2 oz copper PCB, (2008), 24-phase Power VRM (2009)