GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD5

The Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5 offers not only superb overclocking potential but advanced power saving technology. Keep reading to find out more.

Introduction

GIGABYTE is known around the world for their forefront in motherboard technology and their wide selection across all existing platforms. With the introduction of Intel’s Sandy Bridge, a plethora of motherboards have hit the market, each boasting performance enhancements.  Today we look at GIGABYTE’s more recent iteration of the Z68 chipset: the GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD5. This board was built to a more industrial standard and the quality shows. For those of you who want the most out of your Intel i5 K- series, for $270 this is a serious contender for the competition.

Special Features

The GA-Z68-UD5 provides a multitude of interesting and useful features; most importantly though, is the focus on power management to muscle the most out of overclocking and the ability to benefit from power savings. In addition, GIGABYTE highlights the strengths of Sandy Bridge and implements special hardware and software solutions. Read on for the complete list of features.

 GIGABYTE Touch BIOS™ (Patent Pending) 

Specifications

One of the main features on this particular GIGABYTE board is the inclusion of an HDMI port on the rear plate, providing up to 1920 x 1200 resolution. The majority of power users of course will have their own dedicated graphics card; however, for those who are energy conscious, switching down to the low power mode for normal 2D desktop use and even HD video will enjoy this feature — all without switching or running multiple cables.

BIOS

Normally the BIOS is very daunting to understand and manipulate correctly, so it came as quite a surprise how streamlined and easy GIGABYTE made the interface. They even made a utility to view and update BIOS changes within the Windows environment, which will be explored later in the included software section.

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Upon entering the BIOS the user is presented with only six submenus to initially view, the first one highlighted named “MB Intelligent Tweaker” or M.I.T. is the only menu that has additional screens for all the extreme adjusting; otherwise, the five submenus below only have one basic screen, making everything very simple and logically organized. The MIT section is broken down into: current status, frequency settings, memory timings, voltage settings, and miscellaneous settings.

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The MIT Current Status screen displays core information relating to the CPU frequency, multipliers, bus speeds, and memory DIMM slot population (as well as timings). In the next section of the MIT submenu is where all the action is happening, where users can easily overclock the system (provided it is using a K-series chip) simply by changing the CPU clock ratio — no more mucking about with bus multipliers that keep changing memory speeds. It is here that memory with an XMP profile can also be recognized and run at higher speeds if so desired.

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The Advanced Frequency Timings has one additional submenu where total control over the CPU can be had including aspects such as: locking the CPU clock ratio; enabling safety voltage regulation features; activating power saving modes across cores (or the entire system); and choosing upper limits on auto turbo mode for each core.

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Next on the MIT submenu is the Advanced Memory and Advanced Voltage settings. The profile settings used for the chosen memory was XMP 1866 at standard timings with all voltages across the board set at auto. During testing (once the overclock thresholds were determined) there were never any issues with these timings nor the voltage, this in contrast to the X58 platform, which required extensive tweaking necessary to meet even 3300MHz. Below, the first panel on the left shows the last section of the MIT’s submenus, cleverly titled “Miscellaneous,” where virtualization tech may be disabled.

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On the left panel above Standard CMOS Features such as IDE device (hard and optical drives) detection is displayed as well as the place to set the common date and time. Notice no IDE channels show up on this screen: this is because the choice to use AHCI is enabled instead — the GIGABYTE board boots up a separate detection array for this mode in hardware immediately after post.

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The Advanced Bios Features gives the user the ability to customize what devices to boot from in what order, what boot up screens are displayed, and whether to enable the Sandy Bridge integrated graphics to make use of the HDMI for a native video output. The last menu, Integrated Peripherals, gives the ability to enable or disable various modes for: eSATA controllers, USB 2.0 and USB3.0, the Azalia built in sound codec, onboard IEEE 1394 support, and onboard LAN support. RAID configuration is a dream come true; with just the press of the enter key the drives will be set up properly, without the endless hassles of prep work. 

Packaged Software

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GIGABYTE’s included software was easy to navigate and install without any problems. The menus were clear, concise, and logical to how everything was organized. After dropping the CD in the tray the user is presented with the above menu that is broken down into three main parts:  drivers, application software, and GIGABYTE utilities. As for the drivers, the choice to install everything with one click is available, or the more discerning user may install just individual components. Most of the utilities were already covered in the special features section; however, further details will be given on the more specialized features making the GA-Z68XP-UD5 unique. Listed in the chart below is a complete listing of the drivers and software: 

The ON/OFF quick charge is a great feature: it usually takes 6-8 hours for a full charge on the first generation iPad under a standard USB 2.0 port; using the quick charge port (normally the ones on the front of the case if the front module is wired properly to the GIGABYTE motherboard) it reduced charging time to approximately 2.5 hours. Keep in mind this particular iPad is certainly far from new, so your mileage may vary. For more information on this unique feature check out GIGABYTE’s specially made page for it:

http://www.GIGABYTE.us/MicroSite/185/on-off-charge.htm

The Easy Tune 6, Touch BIOS, and Smart 6 programs all do the same thing: giving the user to the ability to change BIOS settings within Windows using the mouse in a click and point fashion with drop down boxes for the dialogs. Touch BIOS goes into identical details seen in the standard BIOS screen at boot up, where the Easy Tune and Smart 6 have the same identical interface to overclock the system with one click. Very useful for those users that don’t want to mess about with detailed settings and just want to click and go.

One part of the Smart 6 utility included a program called Quick Boost, which is supposed to reduce bootup time by remembering hardware and system software settings. However, on the standard SSD using AHCI BIOS the bootup times actually increased from 7 to 15 seconds (timed from upon seeing the loading Windows logo screen). Incredulously, a quick removal of the Smart 6 utility brought boot times back down to the initial 7 seconds.

To make use of the Lucid Virtu GPU Virtualization technology a few requirements need to met: the Intel HD graphics driver must be installed, an HDMI cable must be hooked into the proper port in the rear of the motherboard, and the onboard VGA adapter in BIOS must be set to AUTO.

Unboxing

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GIGABYTE packs a lot of technology in this small box.  It is evident by the numerous logos that this board may well not only boast to have every current feature known to mankind but perhaps a few new ones also. Great care and detail is shown in all of the highlights on the box which will be covered in more detail.

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Opening reveals some accessories, an installation manual, the driver CD (which includes a few utilities and necessary tools), and of course the motherboard itself sealed up below in an anti-static bag.

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Provided in the accessories is the necessary backplate, an SLI connector for bridging two video cards internally (a very nice bonus since these bridges are usually hard to come by unless users are buying a high end video card), 4 special internal SATA cables with spring-loaded clips (2 of them with the “L” shape plug), and as another bonus, a special USB 3.0 plate that mounts on the front of the case.

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Here is the main profile top and bottom.  Everything is clearly labeled for convenience and it was nice for a change to be able to hook all the cables up (especially from the front panels of the case) without having to refer to the manual.  The back of the motherboard is displayed as a special macro shot to show the details.  Please take note of the heavy duty industrial screws holding down that massive heatsink.  Below are the lateral shots of the board.

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A Closer Look at the gigabyte ga-z68xp-ud5

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The massive copper liquid cooled heatsink deals with heat dissipation from the 20 phase power VRM’s  (voltage regulation modules)  surrounding the CPU.  No matter what the voltage required for the CPU, it is spread out evenly over these heavy duty components. The shot on the right is to illustrate how well the heatsink is actually fastened down. These are key components when it comes to overclocking stability and the industrial approach GIGABYTE took toward this issue is impressive. The design is supposed to benefit from a CPU heatsink and fan mounted in such a way that blows down onto the motherboard — something to keep in mind if users are so inclined to use a tower cooler instead.

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Here’s a few macro close-ups of the board’s PCI slot configuration. On the left is the USB 3.0 Renesas chipset controller as well as 2 x PCI 2.0 slots, 2 x PCI Express x1 slots , and 3 PCI Express x16 slots running at (x16, x8, and x4). The values change in the latter if SLI video cards are used to x8 and x8 speeds. The right shot is to portray the nice spacing and logical placement of the slots. For users still utilizing a standard PCI 2.0 card (such as a preferred sound card) it is refreshing to see that the option of still running SLI is available due to the placement of slots.

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The headers are all clearly labeled and even color coded. A small schematic below dictates the polarity of the wires for some of the finer wiring, definitely a nice plus for ease of use. Twin USB 3.0 internal headers are provided here so one does not have to send a rogue cable outside the case to plug into the back ports. Speaking of ports, the Z68XP-UD5 has conveniently color coded the back into the following groups:  USB 2.0/1.1 above mouse or keyboard ps/2 (red); optical and coaxial S/PDIF out (orange);  IEEE 1394a, eSATA/USB combo connector (supports SATA 6 Gb/s) (yellow), and USB 2.0/1.1; USB 3.0/2.0 (blue). There is also an HDMI output to take special advantage of this board’s feature of being able to switch between Intel’s low power video out and the standard video card for more demanding applications (such as Direct X), limited to 1920 x 1200 resolution.

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Six SATA ports line the edge of the board, 2 of them performing at 6 Gb/s (white) and the other four at 3 Gb/s (black). RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10  is also supported. On the right is a shiny internal power button and above the black power connector is a small reset switch and a clear CMOS switch. Since this board sports a dual BIOS configuration, these switches can certainly aid in preventing any serious damage from a bad overclock.

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Four 1.5V DDR3 DIMM sockets (supporting up to 32 GB at speeds of 2133/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz) take full advantage of the dual channel memory controller (sockets labeled 1 and 2 must be populated). When the Venomous X cooler was installed, the 120mm PWM fan just hung over and blocked the DDR3 4 slot, so keep that in mind if you are considering more RAM than this particular test rig. Just a note about those VRM’s mentioned before; these are special in the fact that the choke, capacitors, MOSFETs and driver IC are all combined into one tight package (those shiny cubes). This increases efficiency and provides rock solid reliability.

Testing & Methodology

This is were the review is going to be refreshingly different.  The Gigabyte board armed with an i5 2500K is going head-to-head against the tried and true ASUS P6T Deluxe version 2.  Keep in mind this is not so much to test if a quad core with hyper-threading can still beat Intel’s latest generation of chip without hyper-threading, but to see how much the Gigabyte board with the latest Z68 chipset can leverage the 2500K’s power over the X58′s chipset. First on the agenda is matching the default speeds of the i5 Sandy Bridge by pushing the clock of the i7 Bloomfield up to 3300 Mhz for a baseline comparison, then onto overclocking the Sandy Bridge up to 4400 (which was the maximum heat level this particular chip could take). 

In the main table listed below, everything marked in bold relates to the Gigabyte hardware being matched up, while everything in standard text relates to the ASUS hardware being matched. The same graphics card and monitor were used.

For benchmarking application software everything was set at default recommended settings unless stated otherwise. The software chosen was to provide a way to see any discrepancies in results between Gigabyte’s Z68 and ASUS’s X58 chipsets at 3300 MHz testing the bus, memory, PCI, and all other bandwidths. Let’s see how overclocking the Gigabyte board widens the margins.  

Benchmarks & Results 

“SiSoftware Sandra (the System Analyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.” 

Even though this test deals directly with processor cores and threads, it is interesting to see the i5 in the GIGABYTE board (overclocked) hold its own against the i7 with 4 extra threads. The inter-core test shows otherwise, but this of course is due to the parameters of the 2500K – if more power in this area is desired perhaps a 2600K would be more applicable. Onto testing the whole motherboard. 

Cinebench R11.5

“CINEBENCH is a real-world test suite that assesses your computer’s performance capabilities. MAXON CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software, CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. MAXON CINEBENCH runs several tests on your computer to measure the performance of the main processor and the graphics card under real world circumstances. The benchmark application makes use of up to 16 CPUs or CPU cores and is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-Bit) and Macintosh (PPC and Intel-based). The resulting values among different operating systems are 100% comparable and therefore very useful with regard to purchasing decision-making.”  

Very little differences are seen between the Z68 and X58 chipsets at default speeds for the the CPU portion of the test; however, a 14% increase in OpenGL rendering is discovered at 3300 speeds, and a rather impressive 34% in OpenGL rendering at 4400 Mhz. Considering how close the memory settings and CPU frequencies were set between the two test systems, this turned out to be a well scaled test. Note:  the GIGABYTE board uses double channel memory, while the ASUS board uses triple channel. Under ideal circumstances the triple channel would have the edge, but then again the X58 chipset is one of the first generation motherboards that used an i7.

PCMark Vantage 

For complete information on PCMark Vantage Please follow this Link:

http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/pcmarkvantage/introduction/ 

“A PCMark score is a measure of your computer’s performance across a variety of common tasks such as viewing and editing photos, video, music and other media, gaming, communications, productivity and security. From desktops and laptops to workstations and gaming rigs, by comparing your PCMark Vantage score with other similar systems you can find the hardware and software bottlenecks that stop you getting more from your PC. Whether you’ve built a complete system, upgraded a component or just want an objective system measurement tool, PCMark is the ideal utility to test computer speed and performance.”

This is a rather lengthy 22 minute test that incorporates multimedia transcoding and several stress tests that touch on all aspects of the motherboard including memory functions and graphic benchmarking. To see a 22% increase at default speeds certainly gives the hat-tip to GIGABYTE’s Z68 chipset for incredible bandwidth across the whole bus. As for the overclock values, a 35% increase over the default was observed.  Keep in mind the max overclock is only 25% over default settings.

3DMark Vantage

For complete information on 3DMark Vantage Please follow this Link:

http://www.3dmark.com/3dmarkvantage/

 “3DMark Vantage is the industry standard performance benchmark for DirectX 10 gaming PCs. It includes two graphics tests, two CPU tests and six feature tests. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark Vantage is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 10 under game-like loads.          This utility is still a synthetic benchmark, but one that more closely reflects real world gaming performance. While it is not a perfect replacement for actual game benchmarks, it has its uses. We tested our cards at the ‘Performance’ setting.”

Futuremark has been the cornerstone of benchmarking for gamers since 1998, when 3DMark99 was released, almost 12 years worth of quantifying benchmark data. At default speeds the ASUS nudges out the GIGABYTE on the CPU test by 2%; however on the overall test (which includes the graphics card score), the GA-Z68XP-UD5 gains a 4% lead. Overclocking provided a miniscule 4% on CPU scores and a huge 17% lead on the overall score. 

Crysis warhead

Crysis Warhead uses the DX9 version as default, the “Gamer” settings were chosen to get in the ballpark of 60 FPS, which is recommended by the game engine. Overall a 3% difference total shows the game is seriously capped by the graphics card.

just cause 2

Just Cause 2, a DX10 game, has a set of three benchmarks built in going through a run of various terrain, scenic outlooks, watery chasms, and exploding towers. At default clock speeds the GIGABYTE board once again gets a 3% edge, but otherwise everything is equalized across the chart (The Dark Tower test did see a small 10% increase on the 4400 overclock).

dirt 2

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Dirt 2, using the most modern version DirectX 11, incorporates a lot of advanced features in the game involving SSAO dynamic lighting (an advanced form of ambient occlusion for global illumination), soft particles, advanced shadow rendering, and ultra realistic reflections.  Here we finally see some evidence that the GIGABYTE board is flexing some of its bandwidth with a small lead of 6% at default speeds and 8% on the overclock — the only real variance across all of the DirectX real-time gaming benchmarks.

It seems that the GIGABYTE board coupled with the i5 2500K is now completely capping out a once top of the line graphics card less than a half year old in the DirectX 9 and 10 gaming arena. The same could be said of the ASUS with i7 920; however, definitely not at the same power cost or heat generated.

Temperatures

HWMonitor is a free polling utility that tracks in real-time all fans, temperatures, voltages and watts (off of the CPU). All of these stats are also easily viewable through the provided GIGABYTE utilities package; however, HWMonitor is updated frequently in respect to all chipsets and CPUs. The screenshot to the right is a sample of HWMonitor polling the GA-Z68-UD5 overclocked after running Prime95.

Prime95 was run for 20 minutes before each recorded temperature setting, with all four cores’ temperatures averaged (for idle and max loads). Wattage load on CPU was 91:  95 watts is maximum draw.

Keep in mind that this isn’t so much a test between motherboards, since the CPU, heatsinks, and fans are all of slightly different configuration, but more of a way to provide information on what the GIGABYTE coupled with the Sandy Bridge heat efficiency is capable of.    

At default speeds the GIGABYTE board is 10 Celsius under the ASUS at load and 13 for idle — as it should be considering this is a state-of-the-art power-regulated motherboard and is in a complete class of its own; furthermore, there is a huge 35 watt peak difference between the Bloomfield and the Sandy Bridge. What is astonishing is at a 25% overclock on air, there is only a 8 degree increase at idle, and a tiny 4 degree increase at load. The Venomous X tower cooler was using only a single 120mm PWM fan.

Power Consumption

Plugging the GIGABYTE test rig into the Kill-A-Watt power monitor the idle and maximum wattage load was recorded. For measuring this particular test all BIOS power management settings were selected for auto, since this is the most ideal parameters for taking advantage of the GIGABYTEs power array. The CPU multiplier and turbo settings were also left at default (cores at 3400, 3500, 3600, and 3700 Mhz). Directly contrasted is the Sandy Bridge then overclocked with power savings enabled and all turbo settings at 4400 across all cores.

Prime95 was used to put a maximum load on the system (results were recorded while running the test); a few minutes afterwards the idle powers were then also recorded.

To be sure that this test wasn’t an illusion, it was run all afternoon until the disbelief was eradicated. Only a 4% difference between idle loads, and 25% difference between maximum loads (at a 25% overclock). Incredible efficiency, especially when it comes to the overclocking with power savings enabled. The idle speeds in this Kill-A-Watt test were expected to be very close to each other considering the motherboard cycles the CPU multiplier down to (x16). Without power management enabled the system will consume 206 watts full time (or whatever the turbo multiplier is set to).

Overclocking

To achieve the stable overclock of 4400Mhz on the i5 the multiplier is set to (x44) and all power management in the BIOS is disabled — essentially keeping all four cores locked at the multiplier. Note that to prevent the cores from fluctuating in a predetermined range, turbo must also be disabled. Prime95 was run for approximately 20 minutes on each multiplier setting and if it returned error free (and the system didn’t overheat) it was good to go. At 4500 Mhz for this particular 2500K, the temperature threshold for safe operation was reached (and instabilities occurred).

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In the above CPU-Z charts is the listed parameters for the CPUs used in benchmarking. On the left is the ASUS P6T with the i7 Bloomfield (and it’s default 8 threads activated) overclocked to 3300, in the center is the GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD5 with the i5 Sandy Bridge (at it’s default 3300 speed), and on the right is the GA-Z68XP-UD5 overclocked to 4400 Mhz. 

Conclusion

The performance of the GA-Z68XP-UD5 was never lacking in leveraging every bit power from the Sandy Bridge; as for the overclocking, for once the experience was refreshing and easy instead of tedious trial and error to get everything set perfect. For the price range of approximately $270, the discerning user would be hard pressed to not opt for this motherboard, contrasted to last generation’s P67 chipset. Of course there are much cheaper Z68 motherboards; however, this board has great quality components. From the liquid cooled heatsink to the state-of-the-art VRM’s, a lot of care and attention to details went into manufacturing.  

The features were accessible and for the most part intuitive to use. There were overclocking, BIOS, and status monitoring application software that seemed to overlap each other in functionality, with the only difference being a graphical interface. This was to serve the purpose of making everything “one touch;” however, it would have been more streamlined if these utilities were put into a tighter, singular package. Despite this, the board has excellent power management for the Z68 chipset. As far as innovation it was great to see some never seen before and actually useful features such as the On/Off USB Charging as well as Turbo USB 3.0. Overall, GIGABYTE’s GA-Z68XP-UD5 is a rock solid performer.