Gigabyte Z68 UD7 - Fail Bitches
So one of the top end Gigabyte Motherboards, comes with a nice price tag of roughly $360 and more bells whistles and gadgets then you can poke your dick at.
Did I mention this is one of the VERY few Z68 boards with 16 x 16 x sli slots !!! - winner right ???
This is where I would normally throw in some specs to get all you tech mongers salivating, but the list is to long for me to even be bothered copy and pasting, so ill rant about whats cool !
16 x 16 SLI or 8x8x8x8x SLI
Cool pre-set overclocking features
alot of other useless shit Im sure someone has a need for.
heres a link to PC Casegears specs if you want more info !
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=138_711_1183&products_id=17176
So youd think for a high end awesomely feature packed motherboard they would have got it right ?
NO, dont get me wrong the board is great, and you get a shit tonne of features (which most people would never use) for your money, but where gigabyte have failed is in the simplest of things....
LAYOUT FOR FUCK SAKE, now on the odd chance Im just a moron and have got it wrong I apoligise.
But the layout of there PCI Express slots is bad, if you are one of the people who baught this board for SLI running at 16x16x youll know what i mean. In order to achieve 16x16x you need to use the 2 16x slots, which unfortunately only have 1 space between them.
So if your running ooooh lets say 2 x gigabyte GTX580's with the nice big tripple fan heatsink, you will probably find your top card is getting hot right !!
So what can you do about this ?
Solution a) water cool your video cards
Solution b) put an air conditioner on the side of your case
Solution c) move one of your cards to an 8x slot
So out of all 3 solutions, moving your card to an 8x slot seems like the most reasonable, and yes it costs nothing to do, and the performance hit will be slight, but if you were one of the people who baught this board to run SLI at 16x16x you gotta be pissed knowing you could have got say an Asrock Z68 Extreme 3 for $200 less which would have done a good job aswell.
So im going to rate this motherboard
There you have it folks, a great motherboard with a huge fucking error