Back in May, Intel launched their new Z68 chipset to address some of the concerns over the P67 and H67 chipsets that were already on the market. Now that it’s been out for a while we can really see if it has brought anything new to the table or if you can get along with a system based on those other technologies…
There are a couple features that set this chipset apart from the others, both dealing with a sort of hybridization of two technologies. First of all, the Z68 is a lot like the P67 but with an added connection between the between the GPU and chipset. This has created a motherboard that lets users dynamically shift between an integrated video engine and a separate, add-on video card. In other words, users can immediately change to the more powerful graphics card for gaming and more intense applications and then switch back to the more energy efficient mode for casual use.
The second addition is the Intel Smart Response Technology (SRT) which allows users to speed up disk performance by using SSD memory in conjunction with a normal hard disk drive. In other words, the SSD can be used as a cache, which means significantly increased speeds, and the hard drive will still provide the large and affordable storage options.
The practical application of this is pretty simple. A user with a nice, new gaming laptop, for example, could quickly fill a large hard drive with a number of game downloads from Steam. Of course, they’re not all going to receive the same amount of play time, so the gamer could simply set the newest or most-played games to take advantage of the SSD speed and leave all the others in the background of a huge hard drive. This way he or she can always get the best performance from the games they enjoy playing the most.
Conclusion
By hybridizing these technologies, the Z68 offers more flexibility than the H67 and P67, which often require certain compromises from users. Both of them had their benefits, but when you chose one over the other, you inevitably lost something. The Z68 features the best of both worlds and has unlocked the power, memory, and graphics for better performance tuning. Now we can tweak and overclock the CPU and GPU together to really push the newest computers to their limits.
The only question left: Will you go through the potential hassle of selling your barely 7-month old system for Z68 hardware?
