14 DAY TRIAL // With just a few hours to go until the Intel Z68 chipset becomes official, the first pictures of Gigabyte's Z68MX-UD3H-B3 motherboard, based on the upcoming PCH, found their way online to offer us some additional details about the board.
Gigabyte's Intel Z68 lineup will be comprised out of no less than 11 motherboards, but the Z68MX-UD3H-B3 is one of just four models to feature support for the Sandy Bridge integrated graphics as all the other lack any kind of display outputs.
As we previously announced, the mobo is also compatible with the LucidLogix Virtu technology that allows consumer to use the Quick Sync transcoding engine found inside Intel's second-generation Core CPUs.
Moving back to the motherboard itself, this bears an eerie resemblance with the Z68-UD3P-B3, but it uses a much lighter VRM setup that consists only of 7 phases in comparison with the 14 phases of the UD3P.
Otherwise, both models feature the same expansion slot layout, which includes two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 that work in an x8 mode when both are populated, three PCI-E x1 and two legacy PCI slots. The Z68MX-UD3H is also compatible with 2-way SLI and CrosFire setups.
Storage is provided by four SATA 6Gbps ports and three SATA 3Gbps ports, as the fourth such connector was routed to the rear I/O panel as an eSATA port.
This is accompanied by four USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, a PS/2 port, a FireWire connector, a Gigabit Ethernet interface, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out, and a full set of video outputs which includes D-Sub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.
The official pricing of the Z68MX-UD3H-B3 has not been announced, but the Gigabyte motherboard has already been listed online for $179 US.
Gigabyte's upcoming Z68A-D3H has also been spotted and it carries a price tag of $138 US (via VR-Zone)
