Hey all, I'm going to be getting an i5 soon and I was just wondering which board I should get. The buyers guide suggests the MSI P67A-GD53 but surely it's better to go with a z68 as they are similarly priced? Ideally want the price to be £100 or nicer if it's below! Thanks
The Z68 boards offer SSD caching (which is relatively useless tbh) as well as support for integrated GPU. Its be better for video encoding also. The P67 boards don't offer these features, but I've heard some people on the forums say they have gotten better overclocking results using P67 boards than Z68. And a P67 board with the same number of PCI slots etc will cost less than a comparable Z68 board. The MSI P67A-GD53 is a great motherboard, if you want to buy the Z68, make sure it has enough upgrade slots as its easily one of the most important features you should be looking for. Hope this helps
Nazata has pretty much summarized it for you. If you're not going to be using the extra features found on the Z68 board, then you're better off with a P67 board .
Z68 lets you still use the computer if your gfx card dies and you don't have another hanging around to stuff in to it in the meantime. Very handy indeed.
Another thing you might want to consider is Z68 boards are more likely to be able to accept the new ivy bridge processors when they release, might not be relevant to you, but could give you a good upgrade path in the future
Also, certainly on scan, Z68 tend to have a cheaper selection on offer (as low as £75 for a Gigabyte mobo) compared to £95 for P67
I love my p67 sabertooth. New bios for ivy bridge is already out for it too. Not thag ivy bridge looks much of am upgrade from sandybridge anyways. Best thing about it is the 7 year warrenty in my opinion. Piece of mind that its going to be useful for a long time
It also doesn't have video outputs making it a pretty useless Z68 board. Z68 has some useful features (Virtu, SRT, overclocking & iGPU) and can often be found for similar prices to otherwise identical P67 boards. There would be no point in going for a P67 board if you can get a Z68 for similar money (assuming the boards have similar feature sets).
I don't need any of the Z68 features but it would be nice to put an IB CPU in there later maybe. I am reading conflicting reports that the P67 boards will work with IB. I have looked at a couple of the cheaper Gigabyte Z68 boards in the £80 range and a couple of reviews on here but the MSI P67A-GD53 is looking like a better quality board to me. Plus it's £91 on ebuyer which seems like a bargain. Shall I just go for that? Thanks Edit: This is the Z68 Gigabyte board I have my eye on: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2011/10/11/gigabyte-ga-z68ap-d3-review/1
They're both good boards for their price, but I think the P67 would be better suited as you have no need for Z68 features and the P67 is a better board for your needs (plus the x8 x8 PCI-Ex16 is always nice for dual GPUs if you want to upgrade in the future). I have heard that the P67 boards will work fine with Ivy Bridge but I can't confirm with conviction... Regardless I think the P67 is the right choice
