Best sandy bridge motherboard

I'm looking at the GA-Z68X-UD4-B3. And putting a WD Black SATA III with a 64gig SSD, the HD and SSD in RAID. The new Intel Smart Response Technology has got my mouth watering.

hmm I do have a 120GB PCI-E RevoDrive and a 480GB WD Velociraptor SATA 3, what is RAID between the two? faster? do they work together?

The new Z68 boards have the new technology. You can set up a RAID cinfiguration with a HD and a SSD. The technology designates a SSD to cache frequently accessed I/O data in a sort of hybrid RAID 0 arrangement. In turn, Windows will retrieve data it frequently requests from fast SSD memory instead of a hard drives' comparatively slow magnetic storage medium. The upshot? Intel SRT can yield like-SSD responsiveness to systems where Windows and everything else is installed on a traditional hard drive. Neat eh?

A fast SATA III HD and SATA III SSD might make a comp system fly!

i'm leaning towards the gigabyte mb, what i am wondering now is if there are preformance gains in getting the UD5 or UD7 versions, i won tbe needing the extra networking slots or anything like that but I already have triple channel 1866 or so DDR3 so i know i'd like the trinple channel support

also the asus board seems to most of everything and is a hotseller maybe its better

oh the boards seem to have dual or single channel  

Yup, these boards have dual channel but they are faster than the x58 boards with tripple channel. At least I have read that in several places. I think later this year Intel is coming out with a new upgrade to the X58 boards. Probably will be faster than the current new Z boards.

read this:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3795/asus_p8p67_ws_rev...

The WS Revolution is loads cheaper and substantially outperforms the UD7. The UD7 and WS both offer x16 x16 on the GFX lanes

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/p67-gaming-3-way-sl...

For triple channel, you're gonna have to go 1366 (X58). At this point 1366 still rules in demanding 3D, Photo and video apps , CAD, etc.......1155 owns the gaming world and just about everything else.

those don't seem to be Z68 based, so the verdict is still out?



i already have what gigabyte claims to be the worlds fastest mb but its not good enough (x58a-ud9) and it does not work well with the revo drive, cant be sure the z68 ud4 would either though

i thought there was a preformance increase in going for the z68 and 2600k over my bloomfield i7 and x58

SKIP the SRT!! That is only for someone who cannot afford a larger SSD for operating system + programs. SRT boost HDD 2 -> 4 X when the HDD is the Boot drive. Effectiveness is highly dependent on User verse the algorithm used to determine what is in the cache (max size is 64 Gig). There are several reviews that touch on this.
There is also a review that indicates that if you have a Boot SSD, that additionally caching the HDD provides little overall performance gain (I suspect that would be highly user dependent). Most reviews are based on the new Intel 311, a 20 Gig SLC drive ($100). Myself, if going this route, SSD boot + HDD storage) would opt for the max cache size – 64 Gig and probable go with a good SATA 2.

As Too The BEST Z68 MB, Not really sure what performance diff is in the Top end Asus/Gigabyte boards. On Disadvantage of the Gigabyte board is no backplane video outputs for the IGP. Will Not one going High end is going to use it (Although a good backup) it does affect the ability to use the Internal ICP to boost video encoding -The Damn Software to provide this functionality will not load.

It would seem that the Asus boards I've looked at fall down when it comes to PCI-E, if you plug a PCI-E 4x in like my Revodrive then the buss will operate at 4x as a whole slowing my GPU down.

So I guess I might go for the gigabyte Z68 UD5 as I don't need all the extras that come with the UD7.