The Motherboard

The GIGABYTE Z68X-UD7-B3 is a great looking board; the all black PCB and black connector setup looks fantastic with that gunmetal grey heatsink setup running down the middle with little bits of gold seen throughout. From top to bottom this is just a good looking board.

Looking at the expansion setup, you've got a really strong setup for people who are interested in going down the multi GPU path. Alongside two legacy PCI slots and a single PCI-E 1x slot, we have four PCI-E 16x ones. Like all our other Z68 boards, though, these don't all run at 16x.

Unlike other Z68 boards, though, GIGABYTE has chosen to include the NF200 chip which gives us some great options for people who want to go down the multi card route. If you use the top slot and the third slot, both cards will run at 16x. This differs to all other Z68 boards we've looked at that will run only at 8x when two cards are installed.

If you install a third card in the final 16x slot, you will have a 16x / 8x / 8x setup. Again, comparing to other Z68 boards which if supporting three VGA cards would run at 8x / 8x / 4x. If you want to go down the Z68 path with multi GPUs, this board is looking like the one to buy. Let's continue looking around, though.

Moving away from the expansion side of things, we can move to the bottom of the board. Here we've got an absolute bucket load of headers. Starting from the left, we've got 1394 FireWire, two fans, two USB 3.0, another fan, two USB 2.0 and our main system header. Just above that final header, we can also see our debug display which will help troubleshoot any problems you're having.

Just around the corner, we can see the header again and next to that we've got eight SATA ports. We've got four SATA2 and four SATA3. The black ports are SATA2 running off the Z68, while the white also run off the Z68, but are SATA3. As for the grey, they're also SATA3, but use the Marvell 88SE9128 chip. You'd only move away from the Intel chip if you needed to make use of a third or fourth SATA3 drive.