Layout

Like with the P67 Gigabyte again uses their new color schema. Therefore the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer now uses a black PCB as well as black expansion slots. If you look at the heatpipe you see that the UD7 features anthracite and cooper. Finally there are also some white spots which aren't distracting at all. We've been very positively surprised of Gigabyte lately presenting such a beautiful motherboard. We even think that this is one of the most beautiful boards ever introduced to the market. The only mistake regarding the layout can be found right next to the northbridge cooler. The PCI-Express x1 slot really is too close to the cooling block which bares the consequence that the slot becomes almost useless.

Like other Gigabyte boards before the Z68X-UD7-B3 comes with a 24 phase power design which guarantees stable current supply and very good overclockability. Furthermore the 24 pahse VRM design is equipped with high quality polymer capacitors which have a life expectancy of 50'000 hours on average, low RDS(on) MOSFETs for lower temperatures and high quality inductors made of ferrite.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Z68X-UD7-B3. Officially supported are DDR3-2133/1866/1600/1333/1066 with up to 32 GByte capacity. The DIMM-slots are quite close to the CPU socket which might cause some compatibility problems with big coolers especially when you choose to install RAM with big heatspreaders.

Northbridge, Southbridge as well as the current converters are being held at adequate temperatures via a passive heatpipe cooling solution. The fact that the cooling blocks around the CPU socket aren't too big make it comfortable to install a big aircooler. We also noticed the very high manufacturing quality of the cooling blocks and their weight which is quite immense.