The Motherboard

While the much cheaper UD3H might have a smaller bundle than the UD7, it does still carry similarly great looking aesthetics. The black PCB looks great and while it doesn't carry the same large heatsink and heatpipe setup, it does still carry a great quality one that blends into the board extremely well.

Looking closer at the board, we can see our expansion slot setup. We've got two legacy PCI ports, three PCI-E 1x ports and two PCI-E 16x ones which support both CrossFire and SLI.

A large cost associated with the UD7 was the inclusion of the NF200 chip. That's of course not included on this board which means dual GPU setups will run in the same way as other Z68 boards. That means if one video card is installed it will run at 16x, if two are installed in SLI or CrossFire, though, they will both run at 8x.

8x performance is very strong and we've seen little difference between it and 16x. There's no denying if you want the ultimate performance in your VGA setup on the Z68 platform, the UD7 with its 16x / 16x setup is very attractive.

Moving to the bottom of the board, we've got our COM header, four USB 2.0 headers, 1394 FireWire and USB 3.0 headers along with our Front Panel system header. A strong amount of connectivity as you would expect.

Turning the corner, we can see the SATA setup. We've got a total of seven SATA ports present here; our three black ones are SATA2 and run off the Z68 chip. The white ports while also running off the same chip, they are SATA3. The two grey ones that look a little bit alone; these are SATA3 and they run off the Marvell 88SE9172 chip.