Zotac Develops Intel Z68 Motherboard with 26-Phase PWM

Zotac doesn't have too much expertise when it comes to building full-sized motherboards, but despite this handicap, the company has managed to develop one of the most impressive LGA 1155 board designs we have seen to date with the Crown Edition-ZT-Z68 U1DU3.

The most distinctive feature of this EATX-sized motherboard is its 26-phase PWM design, which uses DrMOS and SuperML high-density decoupling capacitors to provide LGA 1155 CPUs with plenty of clean power for even the most demanding overclocking attempts.

Another interesting addition is the inclusion of four PCI Express x16 slots, which are driven by an Nvidia NF200 chipset to provide full x16 bandwidth when multiple graphics cards are being used.

In addition to the x16 slots, the Zotac Crown Edition motherboard also sports a PCIe x1 and a 32-bit legacy PCI slot, and these are accompanied by two other mini-PCIe slots.

The first one of this is designed to be used in conjunction with an mSATA SSD in order to enable Intel's Smart Response technology present in the Z68 chipset, while the second one is occupied by a Wi-Fi 802.11n wireless card.

Additional storage devices can also be installed via the eight SATA 6Gbps ports placed on the motherboard, and an extra SATA interface has been routed to the back of the board as an eSATA connector.

Also on the back I/O panel, users will find two USB 3.0 ports, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

Four additional USB 3.0 ports are available through a pair of on-board pin-headers, that are located right near the left edge of the motherboard.

Since the Crown Edition-ZT-Z68 targets enthusiast users, Zotac has also added a series of overclocking-oriented features such as on-board Power and Reset buttons, dedicated voltage measurement points, a supplementary MOLEX power plug for multi-GPU setups, no less than tree BIOS chips, and a POST80 debug display. 

The Zotac Crown Edition-ZT-Z68 U1DU3 is expected to be released soon, but pricing has not yet been detailed. (via WCCFTech)