After my recent review of the impressive ASUS Sabertooth P67 board, I was wondering what ASUS could have in store for us next. Intel released their Z68 chipset not too long ago and ASUS is certainly on schedule with their Z68 lineup. There is a lot to choose from with 10 different Z68 offerings from the company. Today we are going to take a look at the ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe, second in line only to the Maximus IV Extreme-Z as ASUS' top Z68 motherboard.

For those of you not yet familiar with Intel's Z68 chipset, it essentially takes the best features of the P67 and H67 chipsets and combines them into one. With a Z68 board, users can overclock the CPU and use the integrated Intel HD graphics. Previously, if you wanted to overclock, you had to buy a P67 board and you had to use a discrete graphics card. If you wanted to use the integrated graphics, you needed an H67 board but then you couldn't overclock the CPU. In addition to these combined features, Z68 also introduces a new feature called Smart Response Technology (SRT) which uses a solid state drive to cache data from a traditional spinning hard drive. SRT essentially gives your hard drive an SSD-like speed boost while being able to retain the capacity and price benefits of cheaper hard drives.


The board arrived in familiar black ASUS packaging with the product name and some features prominently displayed on the front. Around back is a more detailed breakdown of features. These built-in LucidLogix for auto switching between Integrated Graphics and NVIDA/AMD cards, built-in Bluetooth and dual Gigabit LAN (with one Intel LAN), just to name a few. With such a feature-packed board, what could be left to desire?

Let's get things started by first taking a look at a complete list of features and specifications on the P8Z69 Deluxe.