Asus P8Z68-V Sandy Bridge motherboard

As might be clear from its name, the Asus P8Z68-V motherboard is based around the latest and greatest (so far, at any rate) Intel Sandy Bridge chipset, the Z68 Express.

Intel's Z68 is the chipset most enthusiasts have been waiting for, bringing together the features of both of the original chipsets that Intel unveiled at the launch of its Sandy Bridge processors, namely the overclocking of the P67 Express and the integrated graphics support of the H67 Express.

Although AMD's latest A series of APUs holds the upper hand when it comes to the performance and features of motherboard-based graphics, it's good to see Intel introduce support for both options in one chipset.

Asus's P8Z68-V is a well laid-out board and an attractive one too in its blue, black and grey finish with passive heatsinks keeping the chipset and power components cool.

For storage purposes there are four Serial ATA 3Gbits/sec ports and two SATA 6Gbits/sec (coloured blue and white respectively) powered by the Z68 chipset while another two SATA 6Gbits/sec (blue) ports are controlled by a third-party controller.

All eight ports are edge mounted at ninety degrees, which always helps with the cabling.

Asus has provided plenty of support for the integrated graphics output: on the rear input/output socket panel there are VGA, DVI and HDMI ports (the only missing one is Displayport which is at the moment no great loss as monitors supporting it are still thin on the ground).

If you want to do some overclocking, every option required is available in the motherboard's initial setup screen – and for people used to seeing the formidable and scary standard blue Bios pages, the UEFI design of this board's setup pages will come as something of a shock. It has a graphical interface and you can use a mouse with them, so no more fumbling about with the keyboard. The Ai Tweaker section is well named as it holds enough tweaking options to keep most people happy.

There are also plenty of sockets to plug in external devices with six USB 2 ports, an eSATA port and two USB 3 ports – our main qualm is that we could have done with more of the latter.