ASRock has built up a reputation for building bullet- proof mobos with very competitive price tags and the Z68 Pro 3 certainly isn't a board to let the company down on either score. It's a bit of a surprise to see a fairly well-featured, mainstream motherboard carrying the latest Intel technology for just over a hundred quid. In our bargain-hunting terms it definitely warrants further investigation.
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| ASROCK Z68 PR03 |
Its so well-priced that it s worth getting if you want a no-nonsense board to try out the Z68 chipset. It's a board that's pretty hard to look beyond too; the overclockingsupport of the P67 merged with the integrated graphics support of the H67, Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT) and Lucid's Virtu software are impressive. The bundled Virtu software lets you use Intel's impressive QuickSync video encoding technology even if you have a discrete graphics card in place, and includes some healthy power-saving functions too.
One look at the board shows you where ASRock has cut the Z68 Pro 3's feature set to get it to this price and its mainstream audience: there's only a single, solitary xl6 PCI-e slot. Yes, no CrossFire or SLI support.
The other feature missing is the lack of a DisplayPort on the back panel, but you can probably count the number of people this will upset on one finger. Okay, let's be generous, two fingers. In any case you get the much more useful support of DVI. VGAand HDMI outputs.
Also to keep costs down ASRock hasn't used a third-party controller to provide extra SATA ports, which means you only get what the Z68 chipset can support; two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports. Realistically though that should be plenty of connectors for most people's needs.
No nonsense Z68er
This is a simply laid-out board and of interest for people with smaller compact cases, the PCB is only 21.1cm wide rather than the usual ATX standard 24.6cm. it may not sound much but in certain PC cases that 4cm difference is crucial.
A nice touch is CCO (Combo Cooler Option). Upgrading from a Socket 775 system and have a really good, powerful and expensive third party CPU cooler you're reluctant to part with? No problem, the board has been drilled to accept either a 1155/1156 or a 775 cooler.
The performance though hasn't been sacrificed, keepingpace with the big boys on all fronts. In fact the Pro 3 managed a slightly higher clockspeed out of the 2600K than its Extreme 4 brother, hitting 4.624GHz compared to the other's 4.596GHz. That's tiny margins, but shows how competitive this bargain board is.
If you don't care about multi-card graphic setups or having a multitude of storage options then the Pro 3 is worth a look. If you want to find out what the Intel Z68 is all about without having to break the bank then pick up the Pro 3 board.
VITAL STATISTICS
Price £95
Web www. asrock.com
Chipset Z68
Memory Dual channel DDR3 up to 2,133 MHz
Slots Ix PCI-exl6
l/0 2xSATA 6Gbps, 4xSATA 3Gbps, 2xUSB3.0
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