Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processor is awesome, even my X58 with i7-920 has to smell the smoke of the i7-2600k. But there’s yet another new chipset for Sandy Bridge. Sandy Bridge launched with a big bang, and bring along two new chipsets, the P67 and H67. But there’s another Z68 Express that didn’t appeared until now. So why is it important that you know about it?

Aimed at high performance machines, the first wave of Z68 boards from ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte are around the same price as the outgoing P67 chipset. And there are a lot of other similarities between the two. For example, there’s the Z68 gives you full access to overclocking controls in the BIOS, with switches that aren’t available on the most keenly priced H67 and H61 boards, even if you have an unlocked CPU. Yes, the P67 also has them.

The biggest thing that Z68 has which P67 doesn’t is support for the built-in GPU that Sandy Bridge has on its die. Sandy Bridge comes with an integrated graphics compartment, and can be used on H67 chipset, made for those budget setups. The processor has a QuickSync video encoding engine for crunching HD movies. In most tests this has been obliterating the performance of GPU-accelerated video encoding, but if you dropped a Core i7 or Core i5 into a P67 motherboard, QuickSync was frustratingly disabled. Thanks to the inclusion of Lucidlogix’ Virtu tech on the Z68, you can switch between integrated or discrete graphics, and use QuickSync all the time. Sounds just like Nvidia’s Optimus.

The Z68 is also used for high end system, which means that most of you with high end rigs will most probably be jumping into the SSD bandwagon already. Yes, you can have very fast loading time and boot time, but I’m sure you all know that SSD comes in very small sizes, and so you can’t put many things into the SSD drive. The Z68 chipset comes with the new Smart Response Technology (SRT), by creating one big virtual drive out of your traditional disk and an SSD, and intelligently moving commonly used files onto the faster flash memory of the SSD.

But all these are small matters that can be neglected, and you will be getting similar performance with a P67. So is Z68 chipset motherboard worth getting?

SOURCE via Anandtech