Review: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 motherboard

by Tarinder Sandhu on 28 February 2012, 14:25 4.0

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabdaz

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How we test

Comparison systems

Motherboard Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3P ASUS P8Z68-V PRO ASUS P8P67 PRO Gigabyte P67A-UD3 ASUS P8P67 Deluxe ASUS Crosshair IV Extreme
Motherboard BIOS FC F4 8801 1401 F5 1053 1102
Processor Intel Core i5 2500K (ES) AMD Phenom II X6 1055T (95W)
Chipset driver Intel Inf 9.2.0.1019 and RST 10.1 (10.5 for Z68) Catalyst 10.12 chipset driver
Memory Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3
Memory timings 9-9-9-24-1T @ 1,600MHz
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB
Graphics driver Catalyst 10.12 (15.22.54.64.2622 for IGP)
Disk drive Corsair V128 SSD
Chassis Corsair Obsidian Series 700D
Power supply Corsair HX1000W
Operating system Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

CPU and memory benchmarks

HEXUS.PiFast
Our number-crunching benchmark stresses a single core by calculating Pi to 10m places
wPrime 2.0.4 Another number-crunching benchmark that stresses all available CPU cores/threads
CINEBENCH 11.5 Using Cinebench's multi-CPU render, this cross-platform benchmark stresses all cores
TrueCrypt 7.0a An encryption/decryption benchmark that's partial to AES acceleration

GPU benchmarks

Call of Duty: Black Ops DX9, 1,680x1,050, 4xAA, high quality
3DMark Vantage b1.2 Run at the default performance preset

General benchmarks

Storage performance USB 2.0/3.0 read speed, SSD average read speed
Power consumption While idling and when running wPrime

Testing notes

We've loaded up the 'D3 with some older drivers. The reason for doing so means we can compare it against a selected number of Intel P67 and Z68 boards tested previously. Also added in for comparison is the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T (95W) chip. It's not based on the Bulldozer architecture, but it remains one of the better CPUs to come out of Austin, Texas, in recent times.