That package would be the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro Motherboard. The ASUS P8Z68-V Pro Motherboard takes the multimedia of the H67 and harmoniously combines it with the high performance and features of the P67. The CPU Turbo Ratio and BCLK were only overclockable on the P67 and the iGPU was only overclockable on the H67. This can all now be done on the Z68 chipset. There is LGA1155 support for the latest 2nd generation Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 processors.
Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs and their accompanying Cougar Point chipsets brought a new level of price/performance to the enthusiast market. There was just one problem: you had to choose between a motherboard with the H67 chipset, which enabled the on-CPU graphics and Intel’s new Quick Sync transcoding engine, or a motherboard based on the P67 chipset, which enabled the amazing overclocking ability of the “K”-series CPUs. You could have one, or the other, but not both…until now. Intel’s new Z68 chipset gives the enthusiast both capabilities in a single platform, and ASUS throws in their own enhancements to create one of the most impressive motherboards Benchmark Reviews has ever seen.
The Z68 platform as a whole offers SSD caching as one of the new features, allowing users to accelerate a standard mechanical hard drive by using the addition of a small capacity SSD for caching. This is said to return up to 4 times more performance than the hybrid drives that are on the market today. Another feature that the Z68 has enabled on the Gigabyte boards is Touch BIOS giving users a GUI based interface to work from that even a novice user could use. Whilst this all sounds very great, the paper still shows this board as being P67
based, and leaves us wondering if it gives any significant performance increase or whether it’s just a glorified sales pitch to enable these new features that only a handful of users will really make use of.
The Intel Z68 is a very strange chipset in that it combines the overclocking features of the P67 and graphical features of the H67 into a single chipset. They have also added some key technologies that help differentiate it from the versions and make it better at the same time.
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The G1.Assassin offers all that one could want or need in a gaming system, all on one motherboard. It starts with very uniquely styled heats inks that would make any first person shooter very happy. For the audio freaks out there you’ll be extremely pleased with this next feature, as Gigabyte has embedded Creative’s own X-Fi based (CA20K2) gaming sound card. Yes that’s right, Gigabyte has quite literally stuffed a complete X-Fi card onto the Assassin and Sniper motherboards! This will push your speaker system to the limits, or even up to 150Ω headphones thanks to onboard amplifier. To keep you fragging online till all hours of the night and with a very low latency, a Bigfoot Killer 2100 NIC is also featured. That is barely even touching on what all this board packs. So join us as we dig into this truly killer board and provide you all the juicy details!
I mulled over multiple options for nearly a week before deciding that I wanted to install a PC in place of the current setup. A computer would allow me to add all of my MP3s as well as replace the unsightly TV / VCR combo. The PC would open up nearly all types of digital video formats as well which would certainly come in handy for passengers during a road trip.
