Conclusion

This Gigabyte-Z68AP-D3 motherboard is on the lower end scales of the Z68 marketed boards. Yo may have seen this board around a lot recently as is starting to become more popular, this may be due to is great affordable price for users. As far as the looks of the board, well you not going to get anything special with the lower end of the market, and in the same respect you aren’t going to find many outstanding eye catching features layered on this board. The board seems to have just about entered the lower end market, it has parallel/serial ports which are very old school and has HDMI but we found it odd that DVI/VGA wasn’t included. .It just about qualified for ATX because of its smaller sized design, as mentioned in the introduction.

Performance wise, it has been slightly up and down with the D3. Both MSI and ASRock Z68 boards we tested it against are both in the higher end market, with the MSI board being known as the number one choice Z68 board. As for the Gigabyte D3 being a lower end board, it has actually done well, as you would expect the lower end board to be at the bottom every time, but in fact it on average performed at the middle mark.

As previously said, the board may be a winner because of its great price. The Gigabyte-Z68AP-D3 motherboard is on the market for just £80. So you are getting so much performance for price with this board. For that tiny price, you can really complain about the lack of features on the board. So all in all, to all readers that have been searching for a low costing LGA1155 motherboard that performs to a good standard, then the D3 may be the board to consider, especially if you trying to build your first computer at around £450.

Pros:

• Great price
• Above the standard for performance

Cons:

• Aesthetics
• Lack of Features
• No NVIDIA SLI support

HardwareLOOK awards the Gigabyte-Z68AP-D3 Motherboard an 8/10 Silver Award.