Gigabyte Z68AP-D3

Citizen · 29 Oct 2011 at 09:26

Hello,

Whats the opinion of this board, i notice there's no reviews and i'm a bit wary about buying it. I've always preferred gigabyte boards to any other and the £80 price range seems about right to me.

If anyone owns the board i'd appreciate some feedback.

Cheers guys

C

Smudge · 29 Oct 2011 at 09:54

I have one I put in a recent build and it's been great. OC'd a 2500k to 4.4 by just bumping the voltage up a couple of notches, leaving everything else on auto and the vengeance ram to XMP settings.

I'm sure it has a lot more leg room on the OC but i'm just running it with a single 5850 for now, so dont really require anymore power.

It's a fairly small board, so was easier to fit in my old lian li case than the full atx one I pulled out.

It only does Xfire, no SLI and then will drop your cards down to x4 mode if you do, but does run one card at full x16, so if your thinking of going dual card setup i'd pay a few more quid for the slightly better spec'd board.

It support's SRT and has an msata port on the board which I tried and works fairly well.

Onboard heatsyncs are a bit flimsy, but do the job.

£80 quid well spent IMHO.

Cheers, Matt.

stulid · 29 Oct 2011 at 10:50

No reviews?

its a good'un,

http://www.kitguru.net/components/m...-z68ap-d3-z68-review-bargain-buy-of-the-year/
http://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/gigabyte_ga_z68ap_d3_review,1.html
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc...herboards/gigabyte-ga-z68ap-d3-1026263/review
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2011/10/11/gigabyte-ga-z68ap-d3-review/1

Citizen · 29 Oct 2011 at 11:18

Smudge said:
I have one I put in a recent build and it's been great. OC'd a 2500k to 4.4 by just bumping

the voltage up a couple of notches, leaving everything else on auto and the vengeance ram to XMP settings.

I'm sure it has a lot more leg room on the OC but i'm just running it with a single 5850 for now, so dont really require

anymore power.

It's a fairly small board, so was easier to fit in my old lian li case than the full atx one I pulled out.

It only does Xfire, no SLI and then will drop your cards down to x4 mode if you do, but does run one card at full x16, so

if your thinking of going dual card setup i'd pay a few more quid for the slightly better spec'd board.

It support's SRT and has an msata port on the board which I tried and works fairly well.

Onboard heatsyncs are a bit flimsy, but do the job.

£80 quid well spent IMHO.

Cheers, Matt.

Thanks Smudge

I don't plan to overclock the system ( i'm far to cautious a person)..or use SLi or Xfire, just a single ATI or nVidia card. But yes, it looks a very good board for the price.

Cheers
c

stulid said:
No reviews? its a good'un,

]

I meant no buyer reviews from this site

...but thanks for the links, becoming more convinced to buy now.

c

tipsy · 30 Oct 2011 at 00:05

I'm happy I got this over the asus

varkanoid · 30 Oct 2011 at 09:04

I have one and it is a great board. Call me old school but I still prefer the old BIOS to an EFI one.

I think the onboard micro SSD connector is a bit of a waste though as its very difficult to get something to fit it.

Witcher1979 · 30 Oct 2011 at 10:54

Citizen said:
Hello,

Whats the opinion of this board, i notice there's no reviews and i'm a bit wary about buying it. I've always preferred gigabyte boards to any other and the £80 price range seems about right to me.

If anyone owns the board i'd appreciate some feedback.

Cheers guys

C

I have one as well, good board so far and very easy to get the i5 upto 4.6/4.7ghz.

Smudge · 30 Oct 2011 at 11:05

voorhees1979 said:
I have one as well, good board so far and very easy to get the i5 upto 4.6/4.7ghz.

Out of interest what bios settings did you change to get your clock? I'm tempted to push mine up a little more from 4.4 if it will do it.

Cheers, Matt.

Witcher1979 · 30 Oct 2011 at 11:17

Top my head head unsure, the volts I have are 1.344 and stable at 4.6ghz under prime and IBT. Never crashes or anything, been running about 3 weeks 24/7 encoding/everyday use etc. But I followed this guide here with screenshots then I tweaked and tweaked until I had the lowest voltage without bsods:

http://www.kitguru.net/components/m...68ap-d3-z68-review-bargain-buy-of-the-year/4/

Good place to start, I had a bit of trouble at 4.7ghz. Was prime stable and stable with my own usage but it failed IBT. So I cut back to 4.6ghz. My ram is running at 1600 and ram timings for me are 9-9-9-27. It supports touch bios as well, which is handy.

varkanoid · 30 Oct 2011 at 15:49

the review shows a D2 these are easier to overclock than a revision D1.

Although I always thought its best to disable Intel Turbo Boost and use CPU ratio (which I do) to set the overclock yet the review uses the ITB for the overclock.

Witcher1979 · 30 Oct 2011 at 16:15

I also use the turbo boost for my overclock. What would be the difference in turbo boost vs ratio?

regulator86 · 30 Oct 2011 at 16:57

Great Board - came with my Arkham Destructor system from OCUK.

Currently running at 4.4ghz @ 1.28 vcore stable. The motherboad has this system by which the system downclocks (speedstep I think?) down to 1.6ghz @ 0.85 vcore when idle. Have tested with Prime95/LinX/IBT.

I was just about to post a thread re: this mb:

It's xfire certified, but I have a GTX560. Just because it's not SLI certified, does this mean it won't run SLI at all, i.e 2 x GTX560? Or should it still do the job?

JediFragger · 1 Nov 2011 at 18:41

regulator86 said:
It's xfire certified, but I have a GTX560. Just because it's not SLI certified, does this mean it won't run SLI at all, i.e 2 x GTX560? Or should it still do the job?

No, it won't run SLi m8 hence the cheapness

GizmoTheMogwai · 1 Nov 2011 at 21:22

regulator86 said:
Great Board - came with my Arkham Destructor system from OCUK.

Currently running at 4.4ghz @ 1.28 vcore stable. The motherboad has this system by which the system downclocks (speedstep I think?) down to 1.6ghz @ 0.85 vcore when idle. Have tested with Prime95/LinX/IBT.

I was just about to post a thread re: this mb:

It's xfire certified, but I have a GTX560. Just because it's not SLI certified, does this mean it won't run SLI at all, i.e 2 x GTX560? Or should it still do the job?

Regulator, I want to overclock my i5 2500k, but I am not seeing any VCORE options in Advanced Voltage Settings. Can you tell me what you have done to achieve this overclock?

Tommyzz · 5 Nov 2011 at 04:43

How do you overclock with this?

Tommyzz · 5 Nov 2011 at 16:55

GizmoTheMogwai said:
Regulator, I want to overclock my i5 2500k, but I am not seeing any VCORE options in Advanced Voltage Settings. Can you tell me what you have done to achieve this overclock?

Install the optional extras off the CD that came with the motherboard. There will be a program called smart 6 and Touch Bios. Smart 6 you can overclock your processor just by activating turbo. Mines sitting at 4.2 at 1.05 vCore

.

Oma-Lan-DP · 26 Nov 2011 at 22:12

I have just bought one of these boards, need the parallel port for a dongle for my work.
I was wondering if anyone knows if i would be able to use an OCZ NOCTI 30 gb mSATA card or Intel 40gb 310 mSATA card as a boot drive (will they fit), i.e. can i put windows XP on it & all programs/data on 500gb ordinary drive.

Inazuma · 27 Nov 2011 at 10:25

Is there any reason to buy a more expensive board if you don't need more than one PCI-E?

stulid · 27 Nov 2011 at 10:30

Inazuma said:
Is there any reason to buy a more expensive board if you don't need more than one PCI-E?

It may overclock even higher? this is because the PCB construction maybe better, the components of a higher quality, a more substantial power circuitry for the CPU (more phases). But it still all comes down to the CPU, they dont all overclock the same.