GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD5 (rev. 1.0)

Zitat: The Z68XP-UD5 is another product in a long line of greats from Gigabyte. The performance that came out of our testing was nothing less than fantastic. Whether it is gaming or watching your favorite movie, albeit using the lone HDMI connection, the board performed wonderfully. Gigabyte not only implemented all the new features offered in the Intel Z68 chipset like Lucid Virtu and Smart Response, but they included their own. It begins with the dual BIOS, carries over to the excellent cooling and ends with the Touch BIOS. All of which makes for a complete motherboard. And if your goal is to build a gaming machine, the Z68-UD5 does support CrossFire and SLI with each PCIe slot running at x8/x8. The only two features the Z68XP-UD5 lacked were the DVI and the new UEFI BIOS. Which, depending on the user, the latter may be considered a positive or a negative. [Editor´s Note: While commonly an overlooked design aspect, while the Z68ZP indeed provide a first slot as x1, they designed the heatsink to be too tall for use by any meaningful card. So far the only dedicated cards I´ve seen capable of fitting in the short space provided are NIC and a few SATA or USB cards. Granted, the last full length slot is only of much use by an add-in card, but if a person wanted to run a third graphics card while using a good sound card they couldn´t. That, or it would have to be a PCI slot and then fit in electrically noisy space between the graphics cards. That is just me, but is something to consider.]  The best price we saw online was from SuperBiiz, which was selling the board at $255. Many other retailers price the board closer to $270 before shipping and tax.  

Zitat: Silver Bear Award Pro: + Full native USB 3.0 support + Higher voltage to USB ports for better charging + Great power management + Ease of use for complete package and overclocking + Great performance Contra: - Tower coolers may conflict with 4th RAM slot (if fan is installed on that side). - Redundant utilities - SLI mode runs at PCI-E x8/x8 bus speeds - No UEFI BIOS The GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD5 offers not only superb overclocking potential but advanced power saving technology. Despite some drawbacks, the board has excellent quality and great performance, earning it the Bjorn3D Silver Bear Award .