As reviewers, we’re all guilty of grabbing the new hardware, tossing the box and contents aside, and heading straight for the benchmarking machine. This often leaves us completely oblivious to the effort put into things like packaging, manuals, software, and the extras that create the overall user experience of that product. While this may not be as important for benchmarkers or for very experienced users, this may make or break the experience for everyone else. Especially people new to building their own machines or who aren’t familiar with a particular product or brand.
In an effort to more evenly cover the whole user experience, Futurelooks will be randomly selecting products, and evaluating the user experience beyond the hardware. Taking the things we normally toss to one side in searhc of the elusive benchmark scores, we’ll take this opportunity to evaluate the documentation, software and sometimes the extras that new users and even DIY’ers need, to have a great time building their new machines. Warranty and customer service will also be weighed in on.
Today, we’re starting with motherboards and the first to step up is GIGABYTE. They’ve submitted one of their best examples of all the things the Intel Z68 chipset does: The Z68XP-UD3-iSSD.
About the GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD3 iSSD LGA1155 ATX Motherboard
GIGABYTE’s Z68XP-UD3-iSSD board is based on INTEL’s mainstream Z68 chipset and LGA1155 socket. It features all the things that make the platform not only a performer, but also a great all around system for every day use. Starting with INTEL’s Smart Response technology (ISRT), GIGABYTE has gone to great lengths to include this functionality as part of the design of the board using an onboard mSATA slot and a 20GB SLC SSD onboard. As we have found in our testing, ISRT really does give you most of the performance highlights of an SSD, without the downsides of having to run your whole system off a small SSD, or the complication of having to manage both an OS drive and a storage volume.
Also unique to INTEL’s Z68 and fully integrated onto this board is LUCID’s Virtu technology. This technology allows your system to utilize the integrated on die graphics of the Core series for non graphics intensive tasks, which both saves power, and improves noise levels because your GPU can stay idle. But once the work day is over, you can fire up your favourite games and have your GPU jump to life as you FRAG the rest of your day away.
Supporting that gaming addiction is both nVidia SLI and AMD CrossFireX support. If you’re not a gamer, the built in HDMI port on the back and the integrated INTEL graphics makes it quite capable as a multimedia machine, utilizing the Quick Sync technology built into the iGPU for crunching your big video files in supported applications. And to back up that processing prowess, the board has four DDR3 memory slots to support up to 16GBs of memory (32GB if you can find those 8GB modules).
GIGABYTE adds in their Ultra Durable technology which combines their 2oz copper PCB, Japanese solid capacitors, Lower RDS MOSFETs, Ferrite Core Chokes, plus a new Driver MOSFET that reduces surface mount area, and increases power efficiency. GIGABYTE also adds higher power 3X power USB Ports that allows faster charging of smartphones and tablets using a driver called “On/Off Charge”, allowing you to continue to charge devices even if the system is off. Enhanced audio quality with a 108dB signal to noise ratio should please most users ears. The smallish heatsinks point to less extreme overclocking limit, and definitely don’t give it the protection to survive world record overclocks.
The Z68XP-UD3-iSSD comes with a 3 year warranty for both the board and the SSD (as long as you don’t mess with that sticker over the SSD) in North America with some limitations that we’ll go over in detail shortly. The board retails for around $249 US these days but rebates or sales may bring that down lower. As far as value goes, this board compares well with other boards when you factor in the cost of the SSD on top of the sticker price to get the ISRT technology working.
The only downside is that you are limited to the 20GB SSD onboard if you want to keep your warranty intact, but our testing with some larger drives have revealed fairly minimal gains, making the 20GB SSD onboard a good compromise between cost and size. Not to mention, with the SSD onboard, it makes the setup process much easier. Did I mention it supports both the new IVY Bridge 22nm LGA1155 CPUs and has PCIe 3.0 Support with just a BIOS update?
Now that we’ve introduced the hardware, it is time to see what the GIGABYTE team has come up with in terms of supporting software, extras, and support.
The Bundles and Extras
GIGABYTE’s boards, with the exception of their G1.Killer Series and the top end boards, comes with a fairly minimal bundle of extras. Two right angle and two straight SATA cables in the classic GIGABYTE blue are included with this board as well as the back panel IO plate. Since this board supports CrossFire and SLI, a GPU bridge is included. There are a couple of case badges for Dolby Audio and GIGABYTE in there too. The unboxing experience is also fairly minimal so we won’t be detailing that but it does do the job.
The only thing I felt missing from this particular board and even its slightly more aggressive UD4 cousins is the inclusion of an adapter that allows you to use that HDMI port with a standard DVI based on monitor. Especially since these boards don’t have any other video out connections. DVI is the connector standard for many decent displays and it would have been an excellent value to include an adapter like the one shown above. This would have given far more out of the box flexibility if one chose to get going without a discrete GPU or if one wanted to get the most power savings out of the Virtu technology if you were to plug in a discrete GPU.
The other portion of the bundle is of course the documentation and with the documentation is the system setup DVD. It’s the strength of this documentation and the included DVD that we will be looking at in the coming paragraphs. Treating this as an overall experience, we hope that what GIGABYTE has given us allows us to get this system running and enjoy all the features that this board has to offer, without heading to forums, calling tech support, or stomping around angrily.
Let’s see how useful the documentation really is and where it needs some spit and polish.
Quality and Usefulness of Manuals/Documentation
GIGABYTE’s documentation for this board includes a warning sheet for letting users know NOT to plug in their LGA1156 CPU into this LGA1155 socketed board, a Multilingual installation, the main user manual that covers the two sibling boards which include it’s non-mSATA enabled counterpart, and a separate manual that covered Intel Smart Response Technology only which is actually very useful.
The yellow warning sheet was useful, but it’s another piece of paper that users may nor may not pay attention to. I did notice that the socket already had a warning for the socket cover, but including a sticker around the socket to warn people that this fits an LGA1155 chip and not an LGA1156 chip would actually be far more useful and intuitive. Because someone did think to include a warning sheet in the box, this must have come up as an issue and because LGA1155 and LGA1156 chips do look very similar, it’s better to be safe than sorry. I applaud the effort, but I think it can be done better.
The multilingual quick installation guide is very basic. Far too basic and generic in my humble opinion to be of use to any user working with this specific board. There is already a section of the manual that covers installation in far greater detail, and overall, it does seem very well written, albeit a bit generic. We actually followed the instructions laid out in the setup section in the main manual to assemble our system, but I couldn’t help but get the feeling that they were written for someone using an open test bench or a even on top of the motherboard box. While this is fairly common in a test lab, this isn’t helpful to someone building their system into a case, which is a much more common scenario.
The basic installation guide does go into some case installation steps including the mounting of the expansion cards, but having too many guides can be confusing and I’d like to just see a better section in the manual, written for a case based installation.
Speaking of the manual, skipping past the hardware assembly since we already talked about that (Chapter 1), the BIOS setup in Chapter 2 was pretty thorough, going through every feature there was in the board, but not exactly what it does. As a suggestion, it would be nice to see additional information describing what effect the setting has on the system, turning the manual into a more useful reference guide.
We then move on to the next chapter (Chapter 3) which is regarding the installation of the drivers and the driver DVD and some of its unique features (more on this later) and then the next chapter (Chapter 4) talks about what’s on the DVD including how to use many of the included pieces of software and utilities that come packed on it.
The rest of the main user manual (Chapter 5) are all appendices for some additional options like how to create a RAID volumes on both the INTEL and Marvel controllers on the board. Audio functions are also covered here, but I would think that this would be part of your initial setup and should be included after driver installation. Everything else in the Appendix should be items that can be dealt with after the system is running.
A Smart Response to Intel Smart Response
I like that GIGABYTE recognized the importance of Intel Smart Response Technology on the Z68 platform. Along with the other well known Z68 features, Lucidlogix Virtu and Intel’s Quick Sync, it’s truly a great piece of technology that improves anyone’s system performance. The inclusion of the pamphlet goes through most of the steps needed to successfully activate the feature on this board. Most of which is already done because this board has the mSATA slot and SSD built right in so in working with it, you can skip a lot of steps here.
The only thing that wasn’t covered was how to successfully turn on the feature if you somehow setup the drive mode incorrectly, or had your system set to IDE mode. Under these circumstances, turning on INTEL Smart Response would simply end up in a blue screen when you rebooted. While it is possible to turn on the feature manually, which was covered in our original Z68 platform launch article (bottom of page), GIGABYTE put out a value added piece of software, available from their site, called the EZ Smart Response utility, that made the process of turning on the feature just a push of a button.
I thought that the setup on this board was nearly fool proof for Intel Smart Response. However, EZ Smart Response is still a very useful feature overall that could solve some headaches for some users. Especially since the fix before the utility was released was a full reinstallation of the OS. I’d like to see GIGABYTE do more to support signature features on their chipsets as they have done with Intel Smart Response. I know that Lucidlogix Virtu could have used a few pages in its own leaflet too because of some of the nuances of the setup if you were using a discrete GPU, but wanted power savings and the Intel Quick Sync enabled etc.
Quality and Usefulness of Included Driver Disc
The software DVD is often used as a coaster for your drinks. And that’s a low down dirty shame because the DVD that GIGABYTE puts out is actually quite useful.
After setting up our system and installing the operating system, our next challenge was to get the system into a basic level of functionality. While many products include driver discs that are no more than a bunch of folders and maybe a fancy splash screen so that you can spend all day rebooting and booting your system to deal with each individual driver install, the GIGABYTE DVD actually gives you a real option to install all the drivers and walk away for a little while. They call this Xpress Install.
We put the disc in and fired up the Xpress Install and all the basic level drivers were completely installed when we returned. We just needed to restart and we were done. There was a prompt to GIGABYTE software goodies so we installed that too and the Anti-Virus as well (your choice of Trend Micro or Norton). After rebooting we found Easy Tune 6 (Overclocking Utility), Smart 6 (System Management Utlity), Auto Green (Bluetooth Security/Power Saving Utility) and Dynamic Energy Saver 2 (power saving utility) pre-installed for us to play with. Since the system has no Bluetooth dongle onboard, and as far as the specs go, nor do the other Z68 boards (with the exception of higher end models), the Auto Green utility was pretty useless. Having it installed, except for maybe the few MBs that can use, isn’t harmful either, however, it can be confusing to some users.
Additional apps and utilities are also included on the disc. Things like the Touch BIOS, 3TB hard drive unlock utility (helps you use the full capacity of a 3TB drive), and the Xtreme Hard Drive (XHD) (allows automated setup of a RAID 0 array by installing two new hard drives) software were some of the more useful options available. The BIOS and Software Update utilities are also recommended installs. The disc itself is also the boot disc for the Xpress Recovery 2 feature which is useful for restoring your system to the pristine condition after your initial setup and configuration.
The only downside to this very useful Xpress Recovery 2 software is that no one actually tells you that you have to leave room on your drive (at least 10GBs) to allow the software to do a proper back up of your system. If many moons ago I was told this, I would have started using this software a lot earlier. It’s actually pretty awesome and lets you completely restore your system to its initial pristine installation, before you messed it up. It’s very similar to what a lot of OEM PC Builders use to get you back to the original software state as shipped with the system.
I actually started using this software a year ago for my standard test system and it’s a shame that GIGABYTE doesn’t promote it more, or as one of the important installation steps in the manual or even the quick setup guide.
So all in all, the software disc on this GIGABYTE board is actually quite useful and a time saver, not quite ready to go into the coaster pile. Now let’s have a look at the effort that GIGABYTE put into their other branded software included with the board.
GIGABYTE Smart6
Starting with the things that the Driver Disc installed for us during the quick setup, Smart6 offers a suite of six utilities that vary in their usefulness, all under one roof. We went through each one to see if they were of any use and whether they helped or hindered the user experience.
The Smart QuickBoot feature is a utility that basically cuts down the amount of time needed to boot up the system by cutting down on redundant BIOS hardware checks. The second part puts your system in a suspended mode so that it can get into the OS a lot faster. This cartoon that GIGABYTE has up on their Hong Kong site explains it in a little more detail. Yes. It’s very dramatic.
We enabled the BIOS QuickBoot first and it did seem to get through a bit quicker than normal. The OS QuickBoot, after an initial reboot, did seem to pop into the OS just a tad faster. It does this by putting the system into a deeper suspended state rather than a full power down. But in the big scheme of things, because we were running Intel Smart Response, we really didn’t see much benefit unless you were running only a hard drive. But that’s not possible because this board has the mSATA SSD built in.
Next we have Smart QuickBoost which is one letter different than Smart QuickBoot but does something similar in that it speeds up your system. Concentrating on strictly the CPU, the utility does a fairly safe overclock on your CPU. Our Intel Core i7 2600K CPU was given the option to go from 3.4 GHz stock to 3.78 GHz (Faster) to 3.9GHz (Turbo) all the way up to 4.2GHz (Twin Turbo). Essentially, this is as lazy as overclocking can get and it seems to do it quite well. I know that some of you out there just aren’t into tweaking a BIOS for the most uber overclock so this is totally for you. Plus, with GIGABYTE’s pedigree in overclocking, you can be assured that these boosts in speed will be fairly stable, even with stock cooling. Yes we did try it out, and I have to admit, it is kind of fun to just hit a button and go sometimes.
Smart Recovery 2 is actually one of my favourite tools in this bundle. The utility not only allows you to make an image or snapshot of your system as it is right this minute, but also allows you to restore individual files since the last back up. Taking it the next step, it can also restore your system entirely to the state it was before you screwed up something royally. It also seems much more simple and easy to use that the built in Windows Backup feature.
A slider is provided to allow you to scroll back and forth through your back ups so you can pick the one you want to restore to. The file recovery is similar. The best part is that it’ll do the image snap shots to the same drive, or to a network share or external drive. If you’ve ever used Time Machine Backup on a Mac, this is the answer to it from GIGABYTE and it comes free with all their motherboards, not just this one. The only thing I wish it did was allow me to schedule my own automated backups at specified intervals. It seems to be set to do it every hour and there is an option to have it automatically run, but that’s about it.
If GIGABYTE could iron out these things, including the fact that the built in help file was out of date and refers to version 1, not 2, I think this could really bail you out if you needed it. It definitely has potential. Especially with a few more settings that could limit hard drive space used.
Finally, we get to the SMART DualBIOS, SMART Recorder and SMART Timelock. I wasn’t a fan of the SMART DualBIOS simply because it’s a utility that keeps your passwords and alerts you of appointments, but it requires a password to access it. So if you put all your passwords in, and you forget your master password, you can’t see any of your passwords. Also, people have phones, Google Calendar, and other things to remind them of important dates.
SMART Recorder simply records file access and your on and off time of your system. I guess it would be helpful if you needed to know these types of things, but I’m already on my system a freakishly long amount of time. Most of the time, I don’t even bother to turn my system off. But I guess if I was sharing my system and someone was moving my stuff around, I’d want to know where it went.
SMART Timelock is well suited to households where you have specific times that the kids can use the system. As a parental tool, I think this would be pretty effective, but I can’t see how this would be better than the parental controls already built into Windows 7. I guess if you had an older version of Windows running, this might come in handy.
So overall, it seems that the SMART6 bundle does provide some value and improves the user experience enough that it would be perfect for someone that wants to boost the performance of their system without too much effort. Especially if we’re talking about a daily driver system where we’d want to drive it like an automatic instead of like a manual.
But what if you want to take performance a little further but don’t want to dive right into the BIOS? GIGABYTE has an answer for that as well.
GIGABYTE EasyTune 6
While the SMART QuickBoost feature seems to work great if you’re into a lazy overclock, what if you wanted more control, but still weren’t ready to dive full on into BIOS overclocking? EasyTune 6 is basically the next level up and it definitely shares some similarities with its more pedestrian sibling. You still get three levels of boost, but with an over-reported clock speed of 3.8GHz instead of the 3.4GHz. So, Subtracting about 400MHz, you get about the same overall clock speed increases as regular SMART QuickBoost, but the added benefit of EasyTune 6 is the ability to have more control over the multiplier, voltage, BLCK and memory frequencies. You can also tweak your GPU and fan speeds from this utility.
Is it a great utility? It’s nice to look at and gives you some general hardware info to gawk at and pseudo control of BIOS options. But at the end of the day, it’s not a substitute for BIOS overclocking and there are far better utilities out there for tweaking the GPU clock speeds as well. There seems to be an opportunity here to do better and perhaps cut down on some of the confusion of having two QuickBoost Apps. A stress testing application would also be something that would be very much appreciated and save time.
While we’re talking about overclocking apps, one interesting one available is called CloudOC. It essentially allows one to control overclocking parameters over the network or monitor your system when you’re not in the same room, with a smartphone or tablet through the system’s IP address. It’s not particularly useful, but is available for download if you want to try it. Everyone has one now, but GIGABYTE was the first to release it to the public, based on my recollection.
GIGABYTE Touch BIOS
The BIOS is one area that could do with some prettying up and it has recently seen some redecorating with great looking UEFI BIOS implementations out there. GIGABYTE decided to go with a hybrid EFI BIOS with this board and as a result, it doesn’t have the pretty overlay that some of the other boards have (with the exception of their X79 series which has the beautiful new 3D BIOS). They decided to turn it into software that runs within the Windows OS, which is kind of scary, and I don’t really get the focus on touchscreen interface. Maybe they are just jumping ahead of themselves because Windows 8 seems plenty touch screen oriented.
In practice, the Touch BIOS interface provides all of the functionality of your regular BIOS, but in a less blue background and plain looking way. The overclocking controls built into the BIOS are all there at your disposal if you dare to play with them under the OS. You’ve got mouse control now and you can modify which icons you see on the screen plus you can take screenshots, making it easy to share settings with others for troubleshooting (which you can’t do with most standard BIOS). You can even restart the system from inside Touch BIOS.
I did end up mucking around with it quite a bit and for the most part, it acts like a regular BIOS, just prettier. It was responsive and quick and fairly minor overclocking attempts were often as successful as they were under the “REAL” BIOS as well as any changes to drive order, integrated peripherals etc. It was pretty stable overall, but even a good BIOS can’t help you if you input really risky settings.
Where it falls short though is in the opportunity to have detailed help files on what the features do. Whereas before, the BIOS only had so much room in which to store additional information, the Windows based version should have plenty of space to explain each feature by mousing over the feature before you commit to your settings. There’s so much more potential here I’m not seeing and as far as improving the user experience, it might be useful for those times you want to set something that you forgot to do in the BIOS when you first boot up and it really doesn’t hurt anyone taking up a few extra MBs of disk space.
While Touch BIOS seems to be one of the love or hate pieces of software that comes with this and other GIGABYTE boards at the moment, I can see the potential of this utility unifying all the software under one roof. Essentially taking over from where Smart6 started, Touch BIOS would include those basic overclocking options AND allow the deeper manipulation of the settings on the fly, for example. New software would simply be a plugin or widget of this interface and it would really cut down on the clutter and confusion of all the little pieces of software separately.
Warranty and Customer Service
The GIGABYTE’s Z68XP-UD3-iSSD comes with a 3 year warranty, and is standard across all of GIGABYTE’s boards. It’s pretty good till they outdid themselves with a 5 year warranty on their new X79 series. The warranty is also extended to the mSATA SSD as long as the warranty sticker isn’t mucked with. I can’t see this making a lot of sense in the eyes of a lot of users as SSDs are often sold separately but it is their warranty and that’s their rule. I do have a feeling though that Intel sells these to GIGABYTE with the stipulation that they handle all the warranty issues with this part hence the extra caution. It’s not a cheap part.
The warranty coverage extends to both US and Canada, within the North American continent on their motherboards and the RMA process is executed on their website at this URL. However, digging further into the legalese, it appears that the warranty coverage starts from the date of manufacture and not from the date of purchase which we felt was rather odd. However, no receipt is required for warranty service so if you lose your receipt, you’re not completely out of luck. Even if you bought it second hand. But it does make it sound a bit like false advertising if you purchase the product in store with a 3 year warranty, only to find that you lost a year because the product was made the year before. It really should be “Date of Purchase” with proof of purchase and then “Date of Manufacture” if lacking proof of purchase.
We also found out that there was no option to cross ship the product for RMA/Repair. At least not officially. This is an area where companies often end up losing customers because, while waiting for their repair part to be returned, there is a high likelihood that the user may simply switch to another brand. There is potential for GIGABYTE to really improve on this and keep customers by offering the cross shipping option so that they are up and running again ASAP.
Technical Support for their products is either self serve or through a ticket system. Their self serve options are fairly extensive and they seemed to have improved on this quite a bit and update fairly frequently. If you can’t find the answer there, you can send a ticket up to one of their technicians. The ticketing system for the USA looks like this. Being as detailed as possible seems to be a good idea. There is no phone support available.
Final Thoughts
GIGABYTE’s Z68XP-UD3-iSSD is a surprisingly feature rich and easy to work with board that I definitely found best exemplifies what Intel’s Z68 is all about. Intel’s Smart Response Technology is the most prominent feature of the platform and the way GIGABYTE chose to implement it really allows users to get the benefit from it right away, straight out of the box. Even with the slight premium in price over board’s that do not have the mSATA slot built in, it is well within the ball park of purchasing your board and SSD separately. Plus, getting the Intel Smart Response activated is just a matter of going into the utility and checking the box on this board. While there would be much to talk about in terms of hardware, this was not what we were evaluating today, even though it’s great hardware.
It’s clear that over the years, GIGABYTE has gone to great lengths to improve their documentation. It’s very rare to find a glaring spelling or grammar error these days. The documentation was generally useful but it’s time to streamline things and bring more attention to the features that make the product special. I loved how GIGABYTE made the Intel Smart Response manual a separate and helpful piece. I didn’t think the multi-lingual installation guide was helpful at all, and was made redundant by information in the main manual. There is a huge opportunity for GIGABYTE to get down to brass tax and really fine tune their documentation experience by making it useful to both beginners and a great reference to experienced users. Sometimes all it takes is plunking a less experienced user down and seeing how they do with what’s provided, and fine tune.
The software disc was actually very useful. It actually got our Z68XP-UD3-iSSD up and running properly within about 25 minutes after booting to our fresh OS. Update utilities on the disc made sure we got the latest BIOS, Utilities, and drivers from the GIGABYTE website. Packed inside the disc was also a large number of useful utilities, particularly the recovery utilities and we’ve gone over many of these in detail. But there is an opportunity for GIGABYTE to start to consolidate their software into one suite, perhaps under the Touch BIOS interface, making it far more useful and perhaps more extensible with plug-ins vs. creating a new piece of software to remember to install. With that plug-in functionality in place, it could open the door to user created apps, further increasing the quality of the interface and adding to the user experience.
Finally, we come down to warranty and support, which turned up a couple of surprises. For example, our research found that the warranty is based on the date of manufacture, not the date of purchase and there was no option to cross-ship the replacement once an RMA has been issued. There are definitely big opportunities here to really raise the bar.
The big question is though, does our hands on experience with the documentation, software, extras, and warranty help or hinder the overall user experience? I’d have to say help more than hinder. Compared to a lot of documentation that I’ve gone through in the past, this is actually better than expected. But there is definitely room here to improve here, in particular, work on streamlining the software and improvements to the competitiveness of the warranty process. Every step makes a great all around board like the Z68XP-UD3-iSSD and all of other GIGABYTE’s products that much better. The effort is especially appreciated by those users building their first system or who are having their first experience with the brand.
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