Z68 Motherboards Without Video Outputs? What’s the Deal?

With the launch of Intel’s Z68 Express chipset came the expected influx of supported motherboards. Because Z68 is meant to be a higher-tier P67, however, there were not quite as many models available at launch that we expected, with GIGABYTE dominating the listings with at least eight motherboards. It’s clear that while GIGABYTE is anxious to get rid of P67, other vendors are content with having two separate product lines.

With Z68, as I mentioned in a post yesterday, users can take advantage of both the integrated GPU by itself, or use it in conjunction with a discrete card with the help of Lucid’s Virtu GPU virtualization software. To take advantage of this, your display would have to be plugged into the video output on the motherboard, not the discrete card. Or so I thought.

In looking around at the various launch boards, I noticed that many GIGABYTE boards did not have video outputs, which seemed to me to be a major contradiction to what Z68 is meant to offer up. After all, the chipset offers two major features, and without video outputs on the board, one of those are thrown out the window. In talking to GIGABYTE about the issue, I didn’t get quite a clear enough answer, but hope to hear back from its Taiwan head-office soon.

In talking to two competitors to GIGABYTE, I was told that its boards that do not have video outputs can’t take advantage of QuickSync+Virtu, which was to be expected given that Intel stated that video outputs would in fact be required for this configuration to work. When questioning ASUS about its higher-end boards that also didn’t feature video outputs, I was told that QuickSync+Virtu does still work.

As it turns out, ASUS implemented a super-secret method of negating the requirement for video outputs on the motherboards, so on its Z68 boards that don’t feature video outputs, users can plug their display into their discrete graphics card as normal, and still take advantage of the QuickSync+Virtu feature.

ASUS at launch has four Z68 motherboards (not all of them could be found available online for sale at the time of writing), and two of them support what’s called “D-Mode”, which refers to “discrete” graphics cards. These boards do not have video outputs. Boards that do have “I-Mode”, simply referring to the integrated graphics. All four of these boards feature QuickSync+Virtu regardless of whether they feature D-Mode or I-Mode.

What benefit does D-Mode offer the consumer? Well, if there is one, it isn’t major. The lack of video outputs might be preferred by some, and the benefit of being able to plug into your discrete card as usual is also nice. Aside from that, the technical aspect of ASUS pulling this off seems to be more important than the benefit to the consumer, which isn’t something that happens all too often.