Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 Motherboard Review

The Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 Motherboard has impressed us during extensive testing over the last week. I really do rate the ASUS UEFI interface as the best on the market, it is extremely intuitive to navigate and offers a wide variety of voltage and timings to squeeze out every last ounce of performance.

While tweaking a bios is still considered a ‘dark art' by many people we have tried to show today just how easy it is to achieve sensible overclocks with minimal user intervention and beginner knowledge. The ‘OC Tuner' setting automatically configures the system after a couple of reboots, taking only a few minutes. When this procedure finished, our system was overclocked to 4.43ghz with minor voltage tweaks for stability. This is ideal for a user who has no interest in overclocking, but who wants a modest performance boost for free … without taking risks.

The Asus engineers have cleverly tweaked this OC Tuner setting to offer stable final results without requiring a high end air cooler to maintain good thermal performance. Obviously if you spend time with the bios and have more experience then 4.8ghz-5.0ghz is possible, with the right cooler.

The Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 has been rock solid, even when we tried pushing the 2600k to 5.2ghz. We know this particular engineering sample is only stable to 5ghz, but the P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 posted at 5.2ghz and we were able to get a CPU validation, even though it wasn't stable. This board is clearly suited for both newbies and veterans.

To test today, we used Kingston Quad Channel 2,400mhz memory designed for the X79 platform and we managed to get it running at 2,200mhz with little effort, which translated to over 27 GB/s of bandwidth. This helped improve the overall performance of the system by a small amount, depending on the task at hand.

The Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 is modestly priced, although it is not a budget product. It can be bought from ARIA for £142.79 inc vat and should be right at the top of a shortlist if you want a stable, versatile and easy to configure motherboard for a new system build.

Pros:

• Easy to overclock.
• fantastic UEFI.
• stable.
• support for highest speed memory.

Cons:

• Nothing.

Kitguru says: A fantastic board, ideal for both newbies and experienced users.

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