The Z68 Chipset – A Chipset For Multiusers And PC Gamers

The z68 chipset is Intel’s latest chipset release. This chipset takes the best parts of the previous 2 chipsets, H67 and P67, to form the ultimate fan AND casual pc builder motherboard. It's the culmination in chipsets for the Sandy Bridge line of CPUs. It also represents some pretty cool steps forward in computer building.

When building a gaming pc, one regularly goes directly for the newest components. The speediest CPU, the fastest RAM, the speediest GPU, the most recent motherboard, hard drive, and so on. This motherboard release represents a step forward, though not necessarily for everyone. The key to this is that, apropos gaming power (FPS, or the facility to generate video on the monitor), the Z68 chipset does not do anything additional than the P67 – for video games.

That doesn't suggest that the Z68 motherboards can't be utilised by game-players. There are two main additions to the Z68 chipset which both the H67 and the P67 motherboards don't have. While Z68 has the on board video the H67 featured (P67 did not), the Z68 boards include a third party program called Virtu – this program essentially swaps processing between the onboard and discrete video cards (the card you install yourself) depending on the sorts of video processing being employed. This won't have any effect for gaming , but for stuff like watching web video or processing high end video type stuff the on board video can handle those things better.

The other element of the Z68 chipset is SSD caching. This is a really sweet addition to the gaming armoury if you play games that involve a lot of level loading (like RTS or RPG games) – sometimes this won't have much of an impact on first person shooters beyond speeding up successive tons of the game. This is really only helpful though if you want SSD speed but don’t want to spend a heap of money on a full sized SSD. The SSD caching employs an SSD in the same way as RAM – it'll momentarily cache the programs being used on the SSD so that subsequent heaps of them will be much faster than off an HDD. If you want on employing a full sized SSD though it's still better to just have your OS and programs installed in full on the SSD.

In the end the Z68 chipset turns out to be an excellent chipset for people who use their systems for multiple things – including P.C gaming. If you like to do video editing and processing, or if you want the rate of an SSD without paying full price for that speed, then Z68 is an amazing choice to build a gaming pc.

Joseph Robertson has been building PCs for 10 years and for lots of that time has been helping folks discover the best ways to build a gaming pc. Check out his blog for full info on the z68 chipset.