The Z68 Chipset – What it means to Gamers

The Z68 chipset was the long awaited update to the Sandy Bridge offerings earlier this year. The Z68 chipset essentially combined both the P67 and H67 chipsets into one ultimate offering. How does this all stack up for the gamer however? I’ve taken a look at what Z68 has to offer and I am going to take this article as an opportunity to explain the two main new features that are available. There are two main components that come with the Z68 chipset – in conjunction with the ability to overclock – that are not available on either of the previous systems.

The first component is that of the onboard video. While this was avilable with the H67 chipset, there is a new interface available with the Z68 chipset. The problem with the H67 is that you were not able to overclock your system – this was limited to the P67, which is why that has been my recommendation for the mid range build. This proves to be problematic for the enthusiast, the gamer, and anyone who wishes to procure maximum value for their purchase. As you may know, I prefer to acquire systems which can be overclocked because it provides future value for the system – when your system finally starts to reach a wall in performance, you have the ability to expand upon it’s performance ceiling and increase the life duration of your system, which naturally increases the value of your purchase. The second component – which turns out to be the more important component for gamers – is SSD caching.

Lets first take a look at the onboard video, why it is important. Long story short, there is a 3rd party program made by Lucidlogix which comes with the Z68 motherboards called Virtu. This program acts as an intermediary layer between the video processes and the video cards, and delegates the video processes to either the discrete video card, or the on board video card depending upon which will be able to handle the process better (and your settings). Ultimately, in terms of 3D performance in games, this has no effect. There are different opinions that float around with regard to this feature. If you read about this being a detriment to 3D games, it is likely due to an early implementation of the technology which forced all video processing through this. The current implementation allows the processes only for applications which you designate (such as video watching applications or video processing applications).

Tom’s Hardware has done hard fact checking on this and the benchmarks go to show that Virtu, when set up properly, has no effect upon video game performance. What you may wish to have this feature for, however, is a marked increase in video WATCHING performance, and video processing performance. So if you use your system as a multimedia machine in addition to game playing – such as watching HD movies – then having those processes offloaded to the on board video (which is better at handling these types of video processing than a discrete 3d graphic card), then you will notice a better performance increase there.

The second main feature unique to the Z68 is SSD caching. This feature alone makes Z68 worth it – provided you are willing to invest an extra $120 into a decent SSD. In the short of it, the SSD caching feature turns your SSD drive into an intermediary between the RAM and the HDD. Instead of dropping $500 on a large SSD, you can pay only a fraction of that, and get most of the benefits. What SSD caching does, is it takes data chunks of the most often used programs and stores them on the SSD, to be referenced by the system – this drastically reduces loading times of often used programs).

In essence, this gives you the loading performance of having programs installed on an SSD, without the need to purchase a much larger SSD to accomplish this.

Anadtech did an excellent analysis by numbers of the benefits over a series of programs, from Adobe suite to games. Many of the programs – after being loaded into the cache – proceed to run just as fast as if they were installed on an SSD themselves. The only drawback is that they need to be loaded on the SSD initially by the caching system – and if you have a spate of running a dozen programs, you may knock some off the SSD (depending on the SSD size). This feature provides a significant mark of improvement in performance for a variety of games and overall system performance. You can see the charts by Anantech here, where you will notice the speed improvements for software loading, and especially in game level loading for games like Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft.

The long and short of it all is that Z68 provides two very unique features which provide benefits that to some people will be a tremendous value, while to others won’t provide anything at all. The SSD feature for example, won’t provide you any benefit if you do not wish to purchase an SSD that is needed to act as the cache. While the overall savings can be easily be in the $400 range (over getting a large SSD), you still need to invest an extra $120ish to get a smaller SSD for the cache. The same sort of thing goes for the on board GPU with Virtu switching technology. IF you do not watch a lot of HD videos and you have no intention of doing any sort of video transcoding, then you wouldn’t see a marked increase in performance over a P67 system. As far as that feature goes, the performance difference of a 3d game between a P67 system and a Z68 system is negligible.

All in all, if you currently have a system built around the P67 chipset, I would recommend not upgrading unless that is something you can budget for. The performance increase in terms of the Virtu technology is not worth that upgrade, and as far as the SSD caching goes, one might as well buy a larger SSD (vs upgrading the motherboard and then purchasing a smaller SSD) and have good investment there – saving your motherboard upgrade for the next tech in a years time.

In terms of gaming, both of these features have little impact upon in-game performance – aside from significant load-time improvement (which can be desirable).

If however, you do not have a Sandy Bridge system built, and you are looking for ideas, I highly recommend looking at the Z68 chipset. Consider whether you would want to take advantage of SSD caching, or if you would rather purchase a full sized SSD – where you would have programs installed directly on the SSD and would have no need for the caching. If you do any kind of video work like I do, then the Z68 board could help you in other ways. As far as gaming goes, you cant go wrong with either the P67 or the Z68 – the choice will be entirely dependent upon your usage.

As an update to this article, on April 8th, 2012 we will be welcoming the Maho Bay platform, which features Ivy Bridge and the Panther Point chipsets.  The information as of this time indicates to us that the Panther Point chipsets all include SSD caching and on board video.  This opens up the options for these features.  In addition, the Z77 will fully support PCIe 3.0, and have native USB 3.0 (currently only certain Z68 motherboards support PCIe 3.0).  Check my most recent article featuring an overview on the Z77 chipset.

I hope that this article has given you the understanding to see how your system usage may or may not fit with the new Z68 chipset. In the next article, I will give a short summary of the different manufacturers main Z68 motherboard offerings, and my recommendation for the mid system build. On a separate note, the lapse in updates over this summer has been due to a change in career for me, along with some long term out of state projects and a move. I fully intend on keeping this site up to date from now going forth, and I hope that my views and interpretations help clarify the complex world of gaming pc builds. Thank you for reading!