GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7 - The Board

GIGABYTE have got a very good looking board on offer here with an almost all black setup going on with just some tinges of gold that help the board stand out. Design wise it's very similar to the P67-UD7 and you'll probably no doubt notice that.

Looking at our expansion slots, we've got two legacy PCI slots, one PCI-E 1x slot and four PCI-E 16x slots. GIGABYTE offer support for up to three NVIDIA or AMD video cards. Of course, when you start adding multiple video cards into the mix the lane speeds do change a little bit. If you're using the first and third PCI-E slot for SLI or Crossfire, both cards will run at 16x. If you add a third card into the mix by using the fourth PCI-E slot, that card will be running at 8x.

This is a little different to the other Z68 boards we've previewed because GIGABYTE have opted to use the NF200 chip here which adds further PCI-E lanes into the mix. Overall, a three video card setup should be faster on this board than other Z68 ones due to this.

Below these expansion slots we can see a number of headers which will accommodate FireWire, system fans, USB 3.0, USB 2.0 and your front panel connections.

Looking towards the bottom corner, you can see our onboard debug LED which makes solving any issues easy, while next to that you can see our lineup of SATA ports. The black and white SATA ports run off the Z68 chip with the black being SATA2 and the white being SATA3. Also included are another two SATA3 ports which are grey; these are controlled via the Marvell SE9128 chip.