Gigabyte Z68X-UD5-B3 Motherboard

On-Board Peripherals

The Intel Z68 chipset is a single-chip solution and is also known as PCH (Platform Controller Hub). This chip supports two SATA-600 ports and four SATA-300 ports, supporting RAID (0, 1, 5 and 10). The SATA ports are located on the motherboard edge rotated 90°, so video cards won’t block them.

Figure 4: SATA-300 (black) and SATA-600 (white) ports

The motherboard has two eSATA-600 ports, which are controlled by a Marvell 88SE9128 chip.

There is no support for a floppy disk drive controller or an ATA-133 port.

This motherboard has 10 USB 2.0 ports, six soldered on the rear panel and four available through two headers located on the motherboard. It also has eight USB 3.0 ports, four available on the motherboard rear panel and four available through two front panel connectors. (The motherboard comes with one 3.5” adapter with two USB 3.0 ports for you to install on the front panel of your case.) It is important to understand that, internally, this motherboard has only two USB 3.0 ports, controlled by a NEC (Renesas) µPD720200 chip. One VLI VL810 hub is installed on each USB 3.0 port provided by the NEC chip. Each hub allows four devices to share a single USB 3.0 port. So, if you connect two or more USB 3.0 devices that required high bandwidth and start transferring data simultaneously, the performance won’t be the same as if they were installed at non-shared USB 3.0 ports.

The Z68X-UD5-B3 has three FireWire (IEEE1394) ports, two at the motherboard rear panel (one standard-sized and one miniature-sized) and one available at
a header on the motherboard. These ports are controlled by a Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 chip.

This motherboard supports 7.1+2 audio format, i.e., eight channels plus two independent channels for audio streaming. On this motherboard, the audio is generated by the chipset using a Realtek ALC889 codec, which is an outstanding solution, providing an impressive 108 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 106 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs. This means you are able to capture and edit analog audio (e.g., converting LPs to CDs or MP3, converting VHS to DVDs or any other digital format, etc.) with this motherboard without adding any background noise.

The portrayed motherboard comes with independent analog audio outputs, meaning that you won’t need to “kill” the line in or mic in jacks when connecting an eight-channel analog speaker set, an optical, and a coaxial SPDIF output. You also can route digital audio to your video card to have digital audio in the HDMI connector using the available “SPDIF_O” header.

This motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by a Realtek RTL8111E chip.

In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard rear panel, with shared PS/2 keyboard/mouse connector, six USB 2.0 ports, coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, two eSATA-600 ports (shared with two USB 2.0 ports), two FireWire ports (yellow connectors), four USB 3.0 ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and independent analog 7.1 audio outputs.

One detail we didn’t like about the motherboard rear panel was that the shared eSATA-600/USB 2.0 connectors are blue, thereby making users believe that they are USB 3.0 ports, since USB 3.0 ports are usually blue.

Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel

In Figure 6, you can see all the accessories that come with this motherboard.

Figure 6: Accessories