Gigabyte Z68X-UD5-B3 Motherboard

Conclusions

The Gigabyte Z68X-UD5-B3 has several nice features, such as three FireWire ports, eight USB 3.0 ports, three PCI Express x16 slots, high-quality audio with coaxial and optical SPDIF outputs, a very high-end voltage regulator circuit, and an impressive set of overclocking options, allowing you to increase the CPU base clock using 0.1 MHz steps, which is unbelievable. In addition, you can benefit from Intel’s Smart Response Technology to greatly improve your system’s performance.

This motherboard, however, has some serious drawbacks. First, it doesn’t support Lucidlogix’s Virtu technology, which is one of the new features of the Z68 chipset, so you get only half of the benefits of owning a Z68-based motherboard. Second, the motherboard has only two real USB 3.0 ports. The total of eight ports is achieved by using hub chips. This means that if you install two or more USB 3.0 devices to the same controller and transfer data at the same time, the performance won’t be the same as if you had these devices connected to “real” USB 3.0 ports. And third, the price of the Z68X-UD5-B3 is not attractive, especially when you have so many options costing less.