Never knew a mb could be made so poor untill I bought a Asrock z68-pro3.
Every piece of plastic is about 30% thinner,shorter,narrower.
If you switch out parts a few times stuff will break.
I pressed in the memory very slowly cause Dimms are lower and thinner.
The sata slot on a ssd are thicker then the sata ports on the mb.
I used lube on the 24 pin power connector so it wont break when I remove it.
Every piece on the IO pannel bends when your just pushing in a usb or ps2.
Dont even think of using Viedo out ports cause if you move case with the monitor cable in your connector will pull off the mb.
The tiny pci-e slots will barely hold a double card with or without a screw.
The mb does work good which is the only good thing I can say.
If your a big brute of a person stay away from this cheap board.
I'll have to look up that model.
The OP had asked
"Are the extra features on the z68 boards really THAT significant?" And I have made my own conclusion: "YeS!!"
SSD drives, for sure, are expensive, coming at a high premium per GB. If you buy a 20GB or 60 GB SSD, however, for maybe $100, you can increase the performance of a $55 1 TB SATA II drive by as much as 400%. On the Lucid Virtu -- and with or without it -- I'm looking forward to a dual monitor system and having two heterogeous graphics cards working together. While at the moment, graphics performance judgments about this part of it aren't too stellar, others have touted it because it works. There should be a way to tap that extra graphics power to great benefit.
Especially I'm happy with the ISRT feature, because I have been running a four-drive array in RAID5 off a $350 controller for about four years. The "read" performance improvement has not been that much, and the "write" performance falls at least 60 MB/s behind what ISRT gives. Since the power consumption of an SSD is less than a watt, I can expect progress with this in trimming my electric bill while increaseing "read" and "write performance way above what I had spent -- lessee . . . um . . . $350 + (4 x $70) + (2 x $70) = $770. Let us pause for a minute while I hang my head in shame . . . . The extra pair of drives had been purchased to have on hand if one of the drives in the RAID5 had failed. Turns out -- I didn't even open the anti-static seal on those drives until two months ago -- and one of them had been "DOA" from the time I bought it . . .
Whatever anyone says about the Sandy Bridge, they over-clock really well and you can reap the benefits of it with one of the "K" chip versions, since your board will automatically enable "Turbo-Boost" and boost the speed above the stock value by about 400 Mhz -- without any effort at all on your part. Good RAM is cheap. But especially, we must have waited a long time to open up this hard-drive bottleneck at the "bottom of the pyramid." It is always the largest storage device that is likely the slowest, which always costs the least (per GB). Now -- the bottleneck is open . . .
EDIT: Well, John . . . . It's a budget mATX board. I'm only glad now that I no longer buy high-end boards. I'm actually wondering if the mATX Z68's only cost as much as this because it's such a recently released chipset. I also think the prices might be edging up, but there's also evidence to the contrary.
I still keep my iron in the budget fire -- for the fam-damn-ily. I got two $80 mATX-ers in '08 to upgrade two systems, and they're still rock-solid and going strong. But you're not going to get "Ultra-Durable-3" or "16-phase power."
With the uncertainties in the news looming, I myself might have got that board -- and think of it -- I would have been able to get a beefier Z68 model later and simply transfer my hard-disk with no need to reinstall windows and only some chipset and other drivers to update or change . . . .
[Will Newegg cancel my "no interest until July 1, 2012" after the government defaults?]
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