Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 (Bundle)3. Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 (Board / 1)4. Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 (Board / 2)5. Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 (Bios and Software)6. Testing Methodology7. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark8. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit9. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra10. Synthetic: CrystalDiskMark11. Synthetic: HD Tach 3.0.4.012. Synthetic: Atto Benchmark13. Synthetic: AS SSD14. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.015. Real World: BluRay Playback with PowerDVD16. Real World: Flash HD Performance17. Real World: Media Encoding with Cyberlink Media Espresso18. Real World: File Copying with Kingston HyperMax 3.019. 1 screen gaming: Far Cry 220. 1 screen gaming: Resident Evil 521. 1 screen gaming: Battlefield Bad Company 222. 1 screen gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 223. 1 screen gaming: Alien V Predator24. 1 screen gaming: Lost Planet 225. 1 screen gaming: Metro 203326. 1 screen gaming: Dead Space 227. 4 screen gaming: Batman Arkham Asylum28. 4 screen gaming: Battleforge29. 4 screen gaming: Crysis Warhead30. 4 screen gaming: Devil May Cry 431. 4 screen gaming: Left4Dead 232. Closing Thoughts33. View All Pages

CyberLink MediaEspresso 6 is the successor to CyberLink MediaShow Espresso 5.5. With its further optimized CPU/GPU-acceleration, MediaEspresso is an even faster way to convert not only your video but also your music and image files between a wide range of popular formats.

Now you can easily playback and display your favourite movies, songs and photos not just on your mobile phone, iPad, PSP, Xbox, or Youtube and Facebook channels but also on the newly launched iPhone 4. Compile, convert and enjoy images and songs on any of your computing devices and enhance your videos with CyberLink’s built-in TrueTheater Technology.

New and Improved Features

• Ultra Fast Media Conversion – With support from the Intel Core i-Series processor family, ATI Stream & NVIDIA CUDA, MediaEspresso’s Batch-Conversion function enables multiple files to be transcoded simultaneously.
• Smart Detect Technology – MediaEspresso 6 automatically detects the type of portable device connected to the PC and selects the best multimedia profile to begin the conversion without the need for user’s intervention.
• Direct Sync to Portable Devices – Video, audio and image files can be transferred in a few easy steps to mobile phones including those from Acer, BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Palm, as well as Sony Walkman and PSP devices.
• Enhanced Video Quality – CyberLink TrueTheater Denoise and Lighting enables the enhancement of video quality through optical noise filters and automatic brightness adjustment.
• Video, Music and Image File Conversion – Convert not only videos to popular formats such as AVI, MPEG, MKV, H.264/AVC, and FLV at the click of a button, but also images such as JPEG and PNG and music files like WMA, MP3 and M4A.
• Online Sharing – Conversion to video formats used by popular social networking websites and a direct upload feature means posting videos to Facebook and YouTube has never been easier.

For our testing today we are converting a 3.3GB 720p MKV file (2h:12mins) to Apple Mp4 format for playback on a portable device. This is a common procedure for many people and will give a good indication of system power. We are using the newest version which has been optimised for Sandybridge processors.

Nvidia Cuda acceleration is disabled, then enabled. Both times are recorded.

With hardware acceleration disabled, the time taken was 9 minutes and 7 seconds. When enabling the GTX580 hardware acceleration via CUDA the time is reduced significantly to 7 minutes and 22 seconds. The same task takes around 1 hour and minutes with an Intel ATOM powered system.

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