Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H-B3 Review
by Brendan van Varik on July 11, 2011 7:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Gigabyte
- Motherboards
- Sandy Bridge
- Z68
Dirt 2
Dirt 2 came to the PC in December 2009, developed by Codemasters with the EGO Engine. Resulting in favorable reviews, we use Dirt 2’s inbuilt benchmark under DirectX 11 to test the hardware. We test two different resolutions at two different quality settings using a discrete GPU, and an appropriate integrated GPU setting.
During the testing, I found out that the board performs slightly below average and comes nearer to the bottom of our graph when a 1920x1080 resolution was used. However, whilst testing the lower resolutions where games are more CPU dependent, the board does much better and it averages roughly in the middle.
Dual GPU testing reveals that the board is more or less bang in the middle.
A poor show from Gigabyte. With almost a 20% difference between the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro and the UD3H in the 1680x1050 tests, and a 17% difference in the 1920x1080 tests, this is certainly a weak spot.
Metro 2033
Metro 2033 is the Crysis of the DirectX 11 world (or at least until Crysis 2 is released), challenging every system that tries to run it at any high-end settings. Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware.
In both of the 1680x1050 and 1920x1080 tests, the Gigabyte Z68X-UD3H did very well with hardly any difference in scores.
Just like in the DiRT2 tests, the dual GPU tests are some of the best we have seen thus far.
Just like in the DiRT2 tests, the UD3H is unable to produce results which compete against the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro.
iGPU tests
Top spot in both iGPU tests with an i5-2500K for the Gigabyte here, which is always good to see, but the strength of the Llano APU shines through.
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kamiyo - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - link
hopefully this will inspire me to upgrade the rest of my rigbas94041 - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - link
Why do reviews such as this ignore that which is fundamental to product quality?Namely, Customer Support.
I will never purchase another Gigabyte product as in my experience their support is incompetent and unprofessional.
Until these tech companies are called out on it they will continue to provide abysmal support. Product reviews should provide a measure of tech support capacity just as they measure a products technical features.
just4U - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - link
I've played with this board and it's little cousin, the GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3. I've found that both boards are a little quirky almost as though the bios versions are not quite mature. Small little nagging things that are hard to pin down.The SSD Caching is an interesting feature. I don't notice a big improvement but it's there for sure... even though the Windows 7 Experience index doesn't show it. If you change hardware frequently then you run into issues as well (or I have anyway) forcing you into the setup utility to disable the cache drive and reset it back up after the fact. Things have gotten better since the last bios update but... not quite there yet. (imo)
The0ne - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - link
No gimmick, just a great show if you are interested. For the linguist or anyone interested in words and such, the program runs every week on the weekends. I highly recommend it as I listen to them weekly.http://www.waywordradio.org/
Hope you enjoy them as much as I do :D
henhaohenhao - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 - link
Come go and see, will not regret it Oh look
http://www.ifancyshop.com
henhaohenhao - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 - link
Come go and see, will not regret it Oh look
http://www.ifancyshop.com
Diagrafeas - Saturday, July 16, 2011 - link
This is from the manual."Please note the HDMI audio output only supports AC3, DTS and 2-channel-LPCM formats."
Is this correct?
What about 8-channel LPCM, Dolby TrueHD bitstream, DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream?
goodzhang - Sunday, July 17, 2011 - link
Come go and see, will not regret it Oh lookhttp://www.ifancyshop.com
catchmyevo - Monday, July 25, 2011 - link
Brendan,Thank you for posting an article for this Motherboard, as it made my decision to buy it. One thing though, I wasn't sure if you had come across this but after upgrading the BIOS from F2 to F4, the option to set ACPI Suspend Type S1(POS)/S3(STR) disappeared. Any ideas as to why they would make a change to fix some issues, but removed a feature that's printed in their manual?
Conditioned - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 - link
First review I read of a motherboard that gives dpc. Thats so great for us who play (and ofc for those that do audio processing).For the next review I would like to know:
Was the system under load as you took those dpc measurements? Listening to music, harddisk usage, anything loading the cpu?
Was it in 'idle' mode or was it 'clocked' up?
Where sounddrivers installed? Which ones.
Was hpet on or off?
What nic (model and driver version).
What intel inf version.
I wonder at these numbers cause I have ~60 microseconds in dpc with my msi z68 gd80.
I have done two things to lower dpc:
1) Install brainbits low dpc drivers for my Asus essence
2) I have timerresolution.exe running which increases the dpc timer resolution thereby possibly decreasing dpc somewhat.