Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Review
Up Close
Externally the packaging for the D3 looks just like any other Gigabyte board we’ve reviewed. A combination of the classic white with, as one would expect for a bargain board, a raft of technological information to demonstrate the value you’re getting. It’s only when we open the box and find the IO shield is made from the thinnest, sharpest, aluminium around that you get a hint of cheapness.
As for the board itself it’s surprisingly good looking. There are a few spots where you can see it’s not one of the UD series, such as the small power-phase heatsink and lack of heat-pipes and fan headers, but certainly if you didn’t know better you could be forgiven for thinking this was a much more expensive unit. The major headers, USB, front-panel etc, are all up to the usual Gigabyte standard.
At the PCIe end of the board we have two PCIe slots for your dual-GPU fun and games, as well as a couple of legacy PCI slots which make more sense on a board at this end of the spectrum as it’s much more likely to be an upgrade from older technologies and so the likelihood of people having a PCI expansion they wish to bring across is greater.
Memory is the usual four DIMM slots which, as we’ll show later, are capable of running up to 2133MHz DDR3, so there isn’t any performance compromise here.
