Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 Motherboard Review

The ASUS UEFI bios is immediately familiar as I use their motherboards very regularly. EZ mode is the default setting as it offers just enough settings for inexperienced users to play with. You can bypass this and head into the advanced panels for more tweaks, overclocking settings and fine tuning.

The main panel gives a basic overview of the system configuration. We are using a Core Intel i7 2600k Engineering Sample today, clocked at 3.4ghz.

The AI Tweaker panel is where most of the main goodness is kept. You can push the processor and memory in this panel to squeeze as much performance as possible from the system.

The Advanced panel offers many of the configuration menus to tune the processor and other components.

The monitor panel gives temperatures and fan speeds as well as offering adjustments for the Q-Fan settings.

The boot menu is used to disable or enable the main bios boot screen. The priority of the hard drives and optical drives can be set here also.

The Tool menu lets the user save configured settings, then to recall them later. The bios can also be easily flashed here, via an optical or USB drive.

We generally overclock the system to the limit to see how stable it will be under extreme circumstances. There was no problem achieving a 4.8ghz overclock with the P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3 and Core i7 2600k processor but we have done this before with many other motherboards.

Today we decided to test the ‘OC Tuner' option. This automatically configures the board and processor to a ‘safe' overclocked setting. The board restarted a few times and it ended up with the settings above (4.43ghz – 103mhz bus speed). As we are using expensive Kingston 2400mhz rated QUAD Channel memory, we increased the memory multipler to 2,200mhz.

System validation is available here.

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