Asus P8Z68-V LX

[MrCrispy]

Any thoughts on this motherboard. It's hard to find reviews because every site reviews the Pro instead.

I bought this for my new build as part of the Microcenter combo. Chose Asus since I want UEFI bios. Is it worth upgrading to the Pro? The major differences I see are extra ports, support for SLI (which I don't care about), internal USB 3.0 headers, BT-Go, Intel NIC etc. But I'm assuming basic functionality, stability etc should be the same, right?

 

[sep]

Well...if you're not looking for the extras this is a great board for the price. I have the -V LE and had the same problem looking for reviews.

 

[Coup27]

I just bought one of these boards to use with an i3-2130, so obviously I'm not interested in overclocking.

This is my first ASUS board and I've been very impressed. The BIOS was a breeze to update (listening MSI & Gigabyte???), the EFI BIOS was excellent and the most informative and intuitive BIOS I've ever used.

The board has been completely stable (granted with stock CPU + DDR1333) and all of their drivers installed without any bloatware or unnecessary processes. I did manually download the drivers and installed them one by one. Can't comment on the CD.

Having recently used Gigabyte and MSI boards, deffinately prefer the ASUS.

 

[MrCrispy]

Thanks, good to know. I read on the other Asus thread that people have been turning off the Jmicron controller, BT etc on the Prop boards to speed up the boot, and there are some dual boot issues with Asus?

Will be putting together my build very soon.

 

[Coup27]

To be honest I did try and find reviews for the exact board and found none so I took a bit of a gamble as I didn't want another MSI or Gigabyte board, plus it was the cheapest board which had my features.

I always turn things like 1394, IDE, serial and whatever else off in BIOS. I haven't had a single issue with this board.

If you do decide to get one, there is a mega easy way to update the BIOS. Go to the product page and download the latest BIOS which is 0703. Inside the ZIP file is a ROM file. Save this on a HDD.

When you've assembled your new rig, put this HDD into the system and go into the BIOS. You press one of the function keys and it takes you to a screen to update the BIOS from within the BIOS. Point to that file, select update, a few mins later and a cold reboot (switches itself off for 5 secs), thats it.

 

[MrCrispy]

Will this work with the bios on a usb key as well?

 

[Coup27]

Yes it does. The feature is called Asus EZ Flash 2 and it's in the tools section of the BIOS (in advanced mode).

It does say that the USB stick has to have a single partition and be in FAT32 or FAT16.

Not sure why as it read my HDD which was in NTFS and worked fine..

 

[teddyv]

I have this board, was my first build in 6 years. Went together quickly and easily with an i2500k and 2x4g Corsair Vengeance RAM. I updated the bios from a USB drive from within the bios, and after replacing a failing HD with a good one got Win7 64 Ultimate loaded and all the drivers loaded in no time flat.

I wanted easy and reliable so I skipped the more expensive versions with unneeded extras. I am very happy with it, the difference in speed and performance between it and the AMD 64-3000/939 is simply astounding!

 

[TomBk]

Will be putting together my build very soon.

Hi MrCrispy.
Did you build this computer out yet? If so: How did it go? And how is it going?