Layout

Like with the P67-series motherboards Gigabyte uses their new color scheme. Therefore the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer now uses a black PCB as well as black expansion slots. In conjunction they generate a very homogenous design. If you look at the heatpipe you see that the UD5 comes with an anthracite coating and additional blue element. Finally there are also some white spots which aren't distracting at all. We've been very positively surprised by Gigabyte lately, presenting such beautiful motherboards. We even think that this is one of the most beautiful boards they've ever introduced to the market.

Like other Gigabyte motherboards the Z68X-UD5-B3 comes with a 24 phase power design which guarantees stable current supply and good overclockability. Furthermore the 24 pahse VRM design relies on high quality polymer capacitors which have an average life expectancy of 50'000 hours. Furthermore there are low RDS(on) MOSFETs for lower temperatures and high quality inductors made of ferrite.

Totally you'll find four DIMM-slots on the Z68X-UD5-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.

Southbridge, northbridge 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.