Review-Z68 Chipset (ASUS P8Z68-V Pro): The Best Match for Your Sandy Bridge!

The Board

Asus adopts a black-blue color scheme for its series 6 motherboards. The blue accents on the heatsink and expansion slots look nice against the dark background.

Its layout seems to be well-thought too, with sufficient spacing between components. So far, we didn’t encounter any hardware clearance problems with it.

The I/O Port selection consists of:

• 1x VGA Port
• 1x DVI-D Port
• 1x HDMI Port
• 6x USB 2.0/1.1 Ports
• 2x USB 3.0/2.0 Ports
• 1x E-SATA

• 1 x RJ-45 Port (LAN)
• 6x audio jacks
• 1 x Optical S/PDIF Out Connector
• 1x Bluetooth Receiver

Asus chose not to include any PS/2 connector with the ASUS P8Z68-V Pro. Instead, four USB 2.0 ports occupy the space usually reserved for this connector. Interestingly enough, we also found a Bluetooth receiver sitting on the backplate! Now that’s a positive step up.

These are the types of expansion slots you can find on the P8Z68-V Pro:

• 3x Slot PCI-Express X16
• 2x Slot PCI-Express X1
• 2x Slot PCI

The three PCI-Express x16 slots open up the opportunity for a multi-GPU setup. Up to three graphics cards can be combined together to multiply the graphics processing power. Additionally, you are also provided with two PCI slots and two PCI-Express x1 slots.

Need more connectors? ASUS P8Z68-V Pro provides ample headers for additional I/O ports.

Storage interface consist of four SATA II connectors (light blue) and four SATA III ports. The Z68 chipset controls all of the SATA II ports and two of the four SATA III ports (white). Two additional SATA III ports (dark blue) are provided by a separate controller chip.

The VRM section around the processor socket is cooled by a set of large, blue heatsinks. There isn’t any heatpipe here, but Asus claims that the Digital VRM used on this board generates far less heat compared to conventional VRM components.