May 27, 2011 11:11 GMT  ·  By

Gigabyte already has one of the largest selections of Intel Z68-based motherboards on the market, but the company believes there is room for yet another such product and is currently preparing the Z68XP-UD5 board, which is expected to be officially unveiled at Computex.

The motherboard closely resembles the Z68X-UD5, that was announced just a couple of weeks ago, but Gigabyte has updated its layout to include support for the Intel HD graphics core found inside Sandy Bridge processors.

This means that consumers can now use Lucid's Virtu driver to automatically switch between the integrated GPU and a discrete graphics card, according to the tasks run, in order to decrease the power consumption of the system.

Outside of this change, the two boards are nearly identical and both feature three PCI Express x16 slots, two PCI-E x1 slots and a pair of legacy 32-bit PCI slots driven by an ITE controller.

The first two of the PCI-E x16 slots drop to an x8 mode when both are populated, while the third slot has only four PCI Express lanes routed to it.

Storage wise, the Z68XP-UD5 comes equipped with six SATA ports driven by the Z68 chipset, two working at 6Gbps speeds while the remaining four are limited at 3Gbps.

The rear I/O layout is also nearly identical to that of the Z68X-UD5, but, this time, Gigabyte made room for an HDMI video output.

This is surrounded by four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, two eSATAp ports (powered eSATA/USB combo), a pair of FireWire connectors, a PS/2 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port and 7.1-channel audio with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.

Four more USB 3.0 ports are available through two on-board headers which are located near the last PCI Express x16 slot.

No details regarding the price of the Z68XP-UD5 are available at this time, but Gigabyte's motherboard is expected to launch at the Computex 2011 fair. (via VR-Zone)

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Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5 Intel LGA 1155 motherboard
Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5 Intel LGA 1155 motherboard - Rear I/O ports
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