Z68 motherboard / P67 motherboards

dVengeance

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Mar 22, 2011
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Hello everyone!

Z68 wait?
P67 just build it.

Plan on making a high end Sandy Bridge build with all the new stuff popping up should i just shoot the gun with the P67 boards?

Or wait for the Z68 boards?

Mainly for Gaming and rendering videos in Sony Vegas and large photos in Lightroom and PS.

Is it a huge deal if i shoot the gun now and feel bad later cause the Z68 slapped my P67 board in the face? .. Thanks!
 
At this point, no one knows how much better (if any better) the Z68 boards will be at overclocking Sandy Bridge compared to P67. The only advantage of Z68 over P67 at the moment is the ability to overclock the processor and use the integrated graphics at the same time (which can be helpful when troubleshooting, but not much else when you run discrete graphics). If there are any other advantages, Intel has not published them, or it's pure speculation/rumors. Everything else that used to be on the Intel chipset are now on the processor, like the memory controllers and PCI-E lanes to graphics cards. Basically all that's left for the chipsets to do is manage peripherals, like USB, other PCI-E slots that are not connected directly to the processor, PCI slots, hard drive/RAID controllers, etc. Most of the major performance aspects are now handled directly on the processor.
 
You can have a million Pci-e lanes performance would still be the same more or less. Pci-e performance got nothing to do with the lanes
 
Advantages of Z68 over P67 are the enabled graphics core including QuickSync and the SSD caching function. The SSD cache will only work with up to 64 GB space and it is unknown if you can use a larger SSD and use the remaining space for something different. I would rather buy a larger SSD, put everything on it and not use the caching function. Especially when most 64 GB SSDs have a much lower performance than their bigger siblings.
 
dVengeance, Tsumi,

Much of the information's out there though it's time consuming to find it all. But, dVengeance, you seem to be asking more than a hardware question; you're asking an affective question.

Well, since you're video editing, the Quick Sync feature of the Intel 2nd generation Core (i7/i5...) LGA 1155 processors that came out a couple months ago appears unbeatable by even the most powerful video cards out now.

The P67 won't be able to take advantage of it, but the H67 (out now) and Z68 (out soon, I hope) will. I think Quick Sync will serve you much better than overclocking for video editing. But you'll have to make sure your software is built to take advantage of it, otherwise it will be a waste.

But the Z68 fixes a bit of a conundrum in an awkward way. You'll need Lucid Virtu software running to get discrete GPU gaming performance in addition to on-CPU GPU Quick Sync concurrently, or more accurately, on the fly. A small trade-off with little overhead, apparently, but the fact that it's 3rd party software running in addition to the OS accessing video buffers is a bit unsettling to me. What if they pull support or introduce/don't fix a bug...?

In any case, the performance of Z68 would be hard to ignore in your (and my) case. In terms of overclocking, the Z68 should perform similarly to P67 by the looks of it, but we won't know until they're tested and/or out. The first Z68 boards look like they're not as feature rich as some of the higher end P67 boards, and limited in the number of SATA ports. If you don't RAID and have few optical/storage drives, this will be less of a concern.

For large photos, get a decent video card (go for bang-for-buck) and 8- to 16-GB reasonably fast RAM (again, bang-for-buck). CL7 1333 1.5v DDR3 might work well for you, too, especially if you're not overclocking. The timings might not be as tight with more RAM.

So your preferred chipsets might be Z68>H67>P67 (if you can resist overclocking to the max with the H67).

SSD caching is a neat add-on feature, but a boot SSD is much better.

If you're running a halfway decent system now, you should wait for Z68, at least to see how it performs. P67 might fall in price, too, at that point.

Good luck, and I hope you don't feel bad whatever you decide! ;)
 
boards differ from the P67 is in the back, as the rear I/O panel has received the addition of a wide variety of video outputs, including HDMI and DVI.
The Z68 chipset comes as a hybrid between the P67 and the H67 and was designed so asto allow for overclocking Sandy Bridge CPUswhile using the integrated graphics.
In addition, the Z68 enables motherboard makers to split the 16 PCI Express lanes available from the CPU in two x8 PCIe slots, and implements SSD caching.
This function however, won't become available right of the bat as it has to wait for Intel to release the 10.5 version of the Rapid Storage Technology driver.

So you got a choice use quick sync and game at crap low resolutions at very low settings or forget about quick sync and game at high resolutions on decent settings with a discrete card
 
Spooony, you mean right now dVengeance has to compromise, but not with Z68 and Virtu, once they come out.
 
Also, I forgot to mention that Quick Sync encoding does not change the output product whereas discrete GPU-accelerated encoding such as CUDA does, so that's another benefit of Quick Sync in video editing.
 
Also, I forgot to mention that Quick Sync encoding does not change the output product whereas discrete GPU-accelerated encoding such as CUDA does, so that's another benefit of Quick Sync in video editing.

Are you sure about that? I remember a review that pointed qualitative differences for ALL of the hardware accelerated solutions. I think it was anandtech. IMHO the best applications for QuickSync is 1) generate a downscaled version of a video for mobile devices on-the-fly and 2) energy efficient low-latency video compression for video conferencing on mobile computers.
 
At this point, no one knows how much better (if any better) the Z68 boards will be at overclocking Sandy Bridge compared to P67. The only advantage of Z68 over P67 at the moment is the ability to overclock the processor and use the integrated graphics at the same time (which can be helpful when troubleshooting, but not much else when you run discrete graphics). If there are any other advantages, Intel has not published them, or it's pure speculation/rumors. Everything else that used to be on the Intel chipset are now on the processor, like the memory controllers and PCI-E lanes to graphics cards. Basically all that's left for the chipsets to do is manage peripherals, like USB, other PCI-E slots that are not connected directly to the processor, PCI slots, hard drive/RAID controllers, etc. Most of the major performance aspects are now handled directly on the processor.

Just like Envy 17 Laptop will it have the option switchable grapghics?
 
Are you sure about that? I remember a review that pointed qualitative differences for ALL of the hardware accelerated solutions. I think it was anandtech. IMHO the best applications for QuickSync is 1) generate a downscaled version of a video for mobile devices on-the-fly and 2) energy efficient low-latency video compression for video conferencing on mobile computers.
Omniscence, I was too brash. I thought I had a clear source, just couldn't remember the link, but I'm doubting that now.

Maybe you were thinking about this anandtech article? http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/9

There's also this tomshardware one: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/video-transcoding-amd-app-nvidia-cuda-intel-quicksync,2839-9.html

Both indicate qualitative differences, the anandtech for the 3 accelerated transcoding paths (CUDA, Stream, Quick Sync), compared to a non-accelerated transcoding path (CPU only, I guess). This topic gets technical and subjective, but I wonder if I can take away from the articles that Quick Sync shows some improvements over CUDA and Stream overall in quality and performance.
 
You would really hope that QuickSync has some improvements over CUDA and Stream, after all it is silicon they added for that specific purpose. CUDA and Stream are more general purpose hardware. That said I hope that AMD and Nvidia do something to improve the quality of the GPU assisted encodes or provide better reference implementations to the encoder programmers. It seems like all they care about are numbers, just like they do with the performance of their GPUs in games. While I do not encode much, I would probably use a CPU implementation as picture quality is more important than computing time.
 
I tend to agree, though if it's barely noticeable, I might just make my peace with the quality (maybe). (My pet peeve is stuttery video. It's so difficult to make it as smooth as the original.) Then again, this is why most of my videos are still unedited, that and how long it takes historically to work with them and encode/re-encode.

I found the article that made me think Quick Sync didn't affect the output video: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-May-Launch-the-Z68-Chipset-In-Early-April-183618.shtml
It references a previous article from the same source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Sandy-Bridge-Quick-Sync-Technology-Better-Than-Nvidia-at-Video-Transcoding-178130.shtml, and reiterates it dated just yesterday: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Renames-the-Z68-s-SSD-Caching-Feature-to-Smart-Response-193560.shtml.

What are we missing here?
 
I tend to agree, though if it's barely noticeable, I might just make my peace with the quality (maybe). (My pet peeve is stuttery video. It's so difficult to make it as smooth as the original.) Then again, this is why most of my videos are still unedited, that and how long it takes historically to work with them and encode/re-encode.

I found the article that made me think Quick Sync didn't affect the output video: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-May-Launch-the-Z68-Chipset-In-Early-April-183618.shtml
It references a previous article from the same source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Sandy-Bridge-Quick-Sync-Technology-Better-Than-Nvidia-at-Video-Transcoding-178130.shtml, and reiterates it dated just yesterday: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Renames-the-Z68-s-SSD-Caching-Feature-to-Smart-Response-193560.shtml.

What are we missing here?

It sounds like their comparison of image quality was merely an optical inspection. There is no mention of the methodology they applied to their quality test.
 
It sounds like their comparison of image quality was merely an optical inspection. There is no mention of the methodology they applied to their quality test.

No methodology mentioned at all.

I think I see what the author (signed Sorin Nita) did there. The January article cited the same Anandtech article we were writing about a few days ago. Nita noted the Anandtech reviewer's (Anand Lal Shimpi's) comments on CUDA: "The GeForce GTX 460 looks horrible here. The output looks like an old film, it’s simply inexcusable.” Subsequently in the February article, it looks like Nita just ran with that comparison, stating, "without affecting the image quality of the resulting video (unlike Nvidia's CUDA codepath)", making it appear to me that Quick Sync in fact doesn't affect the image quality of the resulting video, whereas in reality at best Quick Sync just may not appear to affect the final output as much as CUDA in that example because of it's perceived fidelity. Even if the difference in output quality is striking and Quick Sync acceleration is as close to non-accelerated CPU encoding as we have been able to get, the statement is quite misleading to me, if that's the case, so thank you again for catching both me and the news.softpedia.com author. ;)
 
DVengeance, Tsumi,

Regarding overclocking, I happened upon an interesting, and basic issue: is there a trending quality difference between the P67 and Z68 when it comes to overclocking durability?

There is an interesting, if somewhat uncivil, discussion at tomshardware about the quantity of power delivery phases and durability of motherboards. Should be considered if overclocking is a goal, but since dVengeance didn't mention overclocking outright, just video editing, maybe this isn't as much of a concern in this thread.
 
The first Z68 boards look like they're not as feature rich as some of the higher end P67 boards, and limited in the number of SATA ports. If you don't RAID and have few optical/storage drives, this will be less of a concern.


how many SATA ports on the boards that you have seen?



A small trade-off with little overhead, apparently, but the fact that it's 3rd party software running in addition to the OS accessing video buffers is a bit unsettling to me. What if they pull support or introduce/don't fix a bug...?


Yeah, timely support and the performance penalty are a concern for me (though small). That with having to take apart my current computer makes me think I will stick with P67
 
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