Asus P8Z68-V LX Z68 Motherboard Review

Firstly I’m going to admit, that I feel Asus could have chosen a better colour PCB to make things match up a bit better. Even a black PCB to match the styling on the box would have been better than brown, but it still works to some degree, but we’re not going to be to fussed, as for most of its life, the board will sit inside a chassis covered in bright, sparkling components which should be nicely complimented by the blue slots and reflective passion Asus branded heatsink, which does look very nice and has an upmarket feel to it, much like the packaging does.

Now when it comes down to features, we find ourselves comparing the board to the recently looked at Z68AP-D3, as they both offer a similar type of market share and are both in the same price segment as well. What we do find with the Asus P8Z68-V LX however, is that they haven’t skimped as much, and are still able to offer more of a selection in terms of PCI-Express expansion slots, as well as a plentiful rear I/O that’s not plastered with old technology such as serial and parallel ports. Instead we find HDMI, DVI and VGA which is about the oldest aspect of the board unless you count PS2. It just goes to show that you don’t have to lose all of the fundimentals of a board like this, just because it’s half the price of a rival board.

Speaking of price, you may be interested to know that this board currently retails at £78.82, which is a fantastic price point for a board with so many great features. Call it the no frills option if you wish, as it simply has it all and does it all from what we found. Performance wise was nothing short of respectable, as it offered great results across our whole testing platform, in both gaming and CPU intensive tests, memory and overall system benchmarks and it overclocked well too.

Overclocking was made easy by use of the graphical UEFI BIOS that Asus have chucked in. A respectable 4.6GHz was easy to get to, and being under water through use of a Corsair H80, we knew our 2700k could do more, so we went straight for 5GHz at 1.525v and found a 100% stable system. After some final tweaking, we finally set ourselves down at 5.1GHz, which for a budget board, is absolutely astonishing. It seems this board really can keep up with the big boys.

Though we used a 2700k, we definitely feel that based from what we saw first hand, that this board, a good set of memory and a 2500k would suit it down to the ground and still allow for a nice night out at the weekend from the money saved. This board seems to do everything that its more expensive counterparts can do, but for a fraction of the cost.

We trust Asus as a brand and this board gives us all the ammunition that we need to explain why.