Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-iSSD

Gigabyte and Intel have teamed up to roll out yet another hybrid solid state storage technology that promises great performance at a moderate price.

The result of the cooperation is the Z68XP-UD3 motherboard for Socket 1155 Sandy Bridge processors. This is a midrange board, but still packed with features such as 14 USB 2.0 and 4 USB 3.0 ports, and 8-channel Dolby Home Theatre audio.

Unlike other vendors, Gigabyte is using its own Hybrid EFI BIOS instead of a graphical UEFI one. It’s rich in functionality with plenty of settings for overclocking, and supports 3TB and larger drives. Well, sort of: you can see all 3TB, but have to partition the drive as 2TB plus more.

Looking at the board’s features, it comes with Intel’s Z68 Express chipset that can utilise the onboard graphics in Sandy Bridge CPUs. For that reason, the Z68XP-UD3 comes with an HDMI out port for video. However, the HDMI output is limited to 1920 by 1200 pixels.

Gigabyte has put the connectors for the various front panel ports and switches at the edge of the board. How well this layout will work depends on your case and cable lengths but it should help reduce clutter to have them all in one area.

The busy board layout and cost considerations may have had something to do with the PCI Express slot configuration: there’s a single 16-lane slot and another 8-lane slot, followed by three X1 slots. While the board supports NVIDIA SLI/AMD CrossFireX graphics, using two boards means each will operate at 8X which may be an issue for some.

As you’d expect, the chipset supports 6Gbps SATA 3. The other four ports are 3GBps SATA 2 and you lose one with an SSD drive in the mSATA slot on the board. You can configure SATA drives with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. If you need more drives connected, Gigabyte has added the Marvell 88SE9172 controller that drives two SATA 6Gbps ports with RAID 0 and 1 support.

The main draw card for the Z68XP-UD3 is the inclusion of the 20GB Intel Smart Response SSD. This is a “Larsen Creek” Intel 311 Series 34nm SSD mounted on a small 3Gbps mSATA card in the middle of the motherboard. Vital statistics for the SSD are 190MBps sequential reads and 100MBps sequential writes, with 37kIOPS for random reads and 3.3kIOPS for random writes. Latency is given as 65ìS for reads and 75ìS for writes.

In other words, good but not mind-blowing figures; this is due to reliability considerations leading Intel to choose Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash memory, instead of cheaper Multi-Level or MLC chips. SLC drives are more durable than MLC ones and also don’t tend to slow down if they fill up completely. The latter is important, because the cache SSD will be full at all times in order to work effectively.

As a rule of thumb, SLC drives are horrendously expensive and have smaller capacity than their MLC counterparts. The price premium for the SLC iSSD variant of the Z68XP-UDR is about $170. The 311 SSD itself retails for around $230 which is about as much as a 60GB MLC SATA 6Gbps OCZ Vertex III costs.

By and large, Gigabyte’s SRT implementation delivers. You set the SATA controller to RAID mode in the BIOS, install Windows as usual, plus the Intel SRT application. Then, pick the drive to cache and the onboard SSD to do the job.

With the Samsung 1TB 7,200rpm Spinpoint drive doing all the work, PC Mark 7 reported a score of 3,601. With the SSD it scored 4979, an increase of 38 percent.

Intel implemented two cache modes for SRT: Enhanced (Write-Through) and Maximised (Write-Back). The former only caches reads to minimise the risk of data corruption; the latter caches writes as well.

As the Spinpoint drive has roughly the same sequential write performance as the Larsen Creek SSD, Maximised mode didn’t affect PC Mark 7 or synthetic benchmark scores.

Nevertheless, Maximised mode improves system responsiveness by boosting random read/write performance 30 to 50-fold compared to normal hard drives. Drive access time didn’t improve under either mode however.

To let SRT stretch its legs, I used an OCZ Vertex III 240GB SATA 6Gbps drive and put the maximum amount of cache – 64 GB – on it. This MLC-based speedster tops out at 525MBps reads and 500MBps writes and now Maximised mode flew along: ATTO reported sequential reads in the 475MBps region for over 4kbyte sizes, and writes around 435MBps. Other test metrics improved by similarly impressive amounts, but the PC Mark 7 only increased 6.8 per cent.

Thanks to SRT and the iSSD, the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 offers SSD-like performance with capacious standard hard drives, and easy installation. It’s a hassle-free way to build a fast system on a moderate budget.