Introduction

GIGABYTE has been extremely aggressive with the new Z68 chipset and it's very much out with the old and in with the new. Over the past few weeks the GIGABYTE Z68 boards have been the ones to show up a lot in corner stores for sale. And after hearing that they hope to achieve 80% of channel stocking at launch, it makes sense.

GIGABYTE have been in there words "aggressively stocking the channel with Z68 MBs for weeks now." In no doubt a bit of a gentlemen's agreement, they send to their distributors who send to the retail channel. GIGABYTE hope that it stops there until May 11 when the curtain is lifted on the new chipset and at that point the retail stores are ready to go. Unfortunately one store decides to sell beforehand and then someone else does and someone else does; you essentially get a snow ball effect of companies selling a product early.

The nature of how GIGABYTE wanted to achieve this target meant that out of the 1000s of retail stores that sell their product, some were bound to either not care about the NDA or not know. Outside of some pictures, though, we haven't seen loads about the GIGABYTE Z68 still.

With 80% saturation the aim for GIGABYTE, let's look at two of the boards they hope to achieve that with. The GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 and Z68X-UD3H-B3 where shown to us in a secret rendezvous. Let's take a closer look!

The Package

Looking at the Z68X-UD7-B3 box, the overall design of it is very similar to that of previous UD7 boards we've seen from GIGABYTE. We've got a gold / black color scheme going and just an absolute bunch of logos on the box front and back. Of course, looking at the front of the box and again we can open it up and get more detail on some of the features that GIGABYTE offer while also getting a good look at the motherboard and the main CPU / Memory area.