![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, May 11, 2011
- Author:
- Daniel Dobrowolski
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro Z68 Chipset Motherboard Review
When Intel brought out the P67 and H67 chipsets, many enthusiasts complained that the features of one or the other were only available on one or the other, but not both. Intel has heard the community and is therefore launching the Z68 chipset. As usual ASUS is among the first board makers to offer a board featuring this latest chipset. The ASUS P8Z68-V Pro promises to be an interesting first look at this new chipset.
Overclocking
I’ve gone on and on and on about this board. I’ll try and keep this concise as a result. Overclocking the P8Z68-V Pro was identical to overclocking boards from the P8P67 family and that’s a good thing. Essentially all I had to do in order to reach 5GHz was to set the load-line calibration to Ultra High and set the CPU-PLL overvoltage option to enabled in BIOS. From there I simply had to find voltages that worked. Increasing my CPU voltage to 1.425v and my CPU PLL voltage to 1.95v were all I needed for stability using a 50x multiplier. Beyond that I had temperature issues and the voltage needed to go up, but stability wasn’t achievable. Memory support worked as it should. I was able to reach the full DDR3 1600MHz potential with my RAM. Though I couldn’t reach the next supported speed of DDR3 1866MHz. I can on some boards but usually they are X58 boards and that’s still a rare occurrence.
When all is said and done the P8Z68-V Pro is a fantastic overclocker and the results speak for themselves.
5.01GHz (100.3x50) DDR3 1600MHz
Conclusion
Dan's Thoughts:
My experiences with the P8Z68-V Pro were long, arduous, and downright stressful at times. To be fair that wasn’t really the P8Z68-V’s fault. The board has two new features. Features that are worthy of a lot of discussion on their own. These are also two features I think many people will care about; the Smart Response Technology and the switchable graphics support through the Lucid Virtu software. Both of these were very time consuming to test. The SRT feature required multiple runs using multiple tools, data sets, and more. We’d have had more results to show you but frankly we aren’t seeing what we should be seeing out of it at this point and we needed to get our ducks in line, which you will see in our standalone SRT article. Really the problem is that any caching feature which analyzes the systems or rather the user’s usage patterns and then acts based on those is going to be hit or miss in testing. I just don’t know if synthetic benchmarks like IO Meter and Crystal Disk Mark will ever be able to capture the benefits this technology may provide.
It will take time to construct the proper cache and reach steady state performance in order to make more easily reproducible results which we can draw conclusions from. We saw 4K and 4K QD32 numbers sky rocket performance wise while other performance numbers, mainly those of a sequential nature take a nose dive. Not into terrible performance necessarily but substantially lower than before. I don’t know that 4K writes alone make up for that.
So is the Smart Response Technology worth it? Well I honestly can’t say at this point. Certainly the feature sounds promising and under the right circumstances I believe it can be, but it’s a bit early to tell for us to tell with this single board. If it works as advertised that alone is a good reason to choose Z68 over P67. Add Virtu on top of that and it’s a no-brainer as far as I am concerned unless price gaps become too large to overlook. Would I switch out a P67 board for a shiny new Z68? Probably not. It’s nice, but I wouldn’t say that it’s so ground breaking that it’s worth the switch out unless you can find a way not to lose a whole lot of money making that switch.
While we had to do several driver updates, BIOS updates etc. and test a lot of video cards with this setup, the P8Z68-V Pro itself was really quite excellent. What we did have to do with regard to testing goes with the territory, especially for new chipset launches. Even with the odd ball behavior here and there because of the drivers I didn’t experience any deal breaking issues. Given the lack of maturity for the platform I won’t hold these initial teething issues against ASUS or Intel. Especially given the fact that this testing was done prior to the official product launch. Given this is the first Z68 motherboard I’ve ever worked with I have nothing to compare it to on an apples to apples basis, but as a motherboard in general I think the P8Z68-V Pro is a good board that will become a great board with a couple BIOS and driver updates under its belt. And of course from an overclocking standpoint the P8Z68-V Pro is already a great board. One of the best I’ve tested yet! If you are in the market for an LGA1155 socket motherboard the P8Z68-V Pro is certainly worth considering.
Kyle's Thoughts:
While we posted this earlier in the article is bears repeating again:
We have some issues with the processor running at slightly higher clocks than it should have, which in turn skews some of the test results in favor of the P8Z68-V Pro. We have consulted with both ASUS and Intel on this but have not come away with any firm conclusions as how to fix the issue. What it comes down to is that the CPU clock is either running at its idle state of 1.6GHz, or its highest Turbo value of 3.8GHz. There is no scaling between the two clock values. We saw this in the last P67 ASUS motherboard we tested as well. If you leave the BIOS to full defaults, even with Windows 7 running in performance mode, you will see proper Turbo scaling, which we have never seen reach 3.8GHz under any kind of multi-threaded mode. Any changes to the BIOS, such as increasing the DDR3 memory clock to 1600MHz alone (as we test all motherboards) gives us the "3.8GHz" problem. Now this causes two issues. First, and most importantly it skews the benchmark scores compared to the other boards shown that do use the Turbo feature "properly." Second, the system represented is not truly performing as it should in regards to the Turbo feature. The fact of the matter is that you probably should not care seeing as how most of our readers will be overclocking anyway, but it is something to be aware of. The better performing scores seen on the previous pages are not indicative of a "faster" motherboard, but rather this Turbo scaling issue (or lack there of scaling). It came down to use either running default clock RAM, which we never do or showing the board with faster CPU compared to the others. We chose to run it with the faster clock.
That issue aside, which probably means little to HardOCP readers, we had no issues relating to the motherboard itself. Surely some of the software and BIOS we are dealing with are immature which is to be expected. Even at accelerated "Turbo" speeds, the board worked flawlessly under full Torture Testing loads. Over a 24 hour full CPU, GPU, and RAM load, we saw no issues with the system at 3.8GHz, which will likely surprise none of you given how stable and overclockable the P67 and Sandy Bridge has shown to be.
One of the issues we have seen with ASUS boards in the past was the "auto overclocking" feature. This is the first time we have had it operate flawlessly for us. Using our 2600K, the P8Z68-V Pro auto overclocking mechanism overclocked the processor to 4.388GHz (43x102) and only took 3 minutes to do so...and did so flawlessly. The P8Z68-V Pro set out vCore to 1.272v. Full 8 thread Torture loads worked seamlessly as well at these speeds. Of course, as you can see from Dan's OCing above, there is a lot more headroom left in the P8Z68-V Pro.
I think the jury is still out on Intel's SRT technology, but I think that the true enthusiast will be better off buying an SSD drive for how they best see it used. I think SRT is going to see more benefits in the mainstream. Again we have a standalone article on SRT today. On the topic of Virtu, for anyone that has sat with steaming GeForce or Radeon cards at their feet will certainly see the benefit in off loading the simple desktop needs from those discrete cards. The ASUS P8Z68-V Pro motherboard's Virtu technology successfully turned off our GTX 480 SLI configuration when our OS was running in 2D. I am sure many of you can understand the value of that alone.
The big question is value. ASUS tells us that MSRP should come in around $205, not to exceed $209. The P8Z68-V Pro should be available today at e-tailers. The Intel SRT and Virtu features, even if immature at this time, add a lot of value to this motherboard, especially at the $205 price point. The overclocking was excellent, the stability was excellent, and the inflated scores were excellent. 
The feature is set is deep, the layout is near perfect, and this board will look purty in a case window. If you like being an early adopter and taking a little bit of risk, the P8Z68-V Pro is going to prove to be the basis of a fun build that will very likely turn out satisfying.
Discussion