I will be getting the same mobo for my brother. His needs are games, YouTube video editing and large media storage and photo editing. It's his getting into uni present
SSD caching will not help you too much in that case (the CAD). It is as the name suggests, a cache for most commonly read (and written) blocks on your hard drive. Nothing more, nothing less. It will speed up the most commonly used files, but the rest will be still at same speed as before. A 20-40GB SSD will speed up at most 20-40GB worth of data from your had drive. I don't say that you shouldn't buy the Z68 Gigabyte board. Just weight the pros and cons really carefully, or you could end up with a board which you will not like in few weeks/months. For example i bought a passive Zotac GT430 card for my HTPC, and only when i was installing it i realized that my CPU cooler collides with the graphics card cooler. If i would have checked out everything before, i would have realized that and bought a different card instead. I suugest the same to you - go through your options, create a limited list of the options. Then check out all of their pros and cons, especially considering your use cases. Check out if all positive items are worth paying for and if the negative items are really that negative in your case. It's just that the biggest mistake you can make is decide for something based on first sight (aka "love on first sight" ), and justify every negative aspect based on that initial impression. Yes, Gigabyte motherboards have a cool black/grey color scheme, but will the board support all you need ? That is the real question. In my case 2 days of reading reviews, opinions, forum posts is a minimum time i spend on researching a specific item before finally deciding to buy it. Lots of people have these boards already - go out, try to find them even on different forums if needed, ask them about their experiences, ask them if they would buy the board again... Edit: For example according to this post the SSD caching feature will be useless to you, as the SSD caching is designed for the OS drive and not for the data drives : http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1037319600&postcount=88
At the minute I use an i7 970 rig that's not mine and I also have a dual core intel system with a gtx260. Anything sandybridge would be an upgrade and with such little in-between mobo I went for the nicest looking. Can't wait for Ivy bridge
Quicksync without onboard video out Can you please point me to where this workaround can be found? You mentioned it twice but didn't go into specifics. Thanks. I upgraded from a P67 to Z68 today and was gutted to find that Quicksync wasn't supported. But that wasn't the only reason I switched over. P67A-UD3R-B3 was disappointing in that it had only 16X and 4X crossfire support, with no right angle Sata connectors which meant 4 sata cables had to push up agains the top video card's air intake with the remaining 2 rendered unusable by the bottom video card. The only good thing for it was the black PCB. Anyway Z68X UD4 B3 as right angled sata cables, most of the Z68 express functions, 8x and 8X crossfire support and more USB3 and eSata ports at the back, I found that the backplate was not particularly well matched with the mobo's ports and had to push the board down a bit to insert my usb devices.
