Gadgetory

apparently in this video we're gonna be comparing the camera man's car to my car I think the camera man wins but that's neither here nor there actually what we're going to be talking about is the gigabyte x58 ud9 this is a very exciting board which I've received endless requests to unbox and have a look at it so let's start with the front of the box unlocked power with electricity and lightning bolts all over the place and for some reason the cameraman wants me to hold this alright maybe he wants me to hold it next to the iPhone that's here all in off charge that's another really cool feature that we've seen on some of gigabytes newest boards on/off charge allows you to charge things via the USB ports whether your computer is on or off hence the name on/off charge so including iPhones iPods whatever else charges by USB let's have a look what else do we got here delivers maximum CPU power with 24 phase CPU power built into this board we have support for four-way crossfire X four-way SLI it has a three year warranty in the US and Canada supports intel's extreme edition six core cpus as well as having their three three three onboard acceleration USB 3.0 three times USB power so that means if you're using a hub you can power three times as many devices without plugging in an additional power adapter as well as ultra durable three SATA 3 and any of any other number three three year warranty there's got to be three of something else supports i7 i7 extreme and it's x58 that's three more things okay I don't know where I was going with that let's take this piece of cardboard off and have a look at the board so this is all basically the same stuff that we saw on the front it has smart dual lan so you've got LAN port automatic switching between the two physical gigabit lan chips offering hassle-free zero downtime high-speed network connectivity hybrid silent pipe - so that means you can either hook up water cooling or you can hook up this huge air cooling heat sink to your board depending on which route you want to go more unlocked powered okay and then we'll run have a look at the back of the box which is exactly the same stuff again okay why don't we just open it up and have a look at this sweet board then and we'll stop looking at the box although it is a fairly nice box I'll definitely give give it like that it's a very snazzy looking box very shiny I don't know if you can see this in the Sun but you see how like shiny it is can you can you see those reflective little dot sort of oh that's not what I want you to like that okay let's open up the board alright so the first thing we're gonna find inside here is oh that was just a teaser the first thing we're gonna look at is the accessories so in terms of accessories we should find a fairly fully loaded package here we have a 3-way SLI bridge you have a four-way SLI bridge because both of those configurations are supported we have the user's manual as well as the driver DVD don't use this download the latest off the gigabyte website we have oh hold on hold on congratulations on your Oh neat okay we have a gigabyte VIP card okay what do you get register today for a chance to win an Apple iPad cool okay we have a gigabyte sticker some extra motherboard standoffs and I'll explain why we need those in a minute we have a smart six users manual as well as a multilingual installation guide but then on the other side we have some SATA 6 gigabits per second cables four of them to be precise oh wow yeah four okay and then we have an IDE cable we have two long crossfire bridges we have an eSATA bracket so this includes power to eSATA ports and that all plugs in internally and then a couple of molex r1 molex to SATA power adapter so that means you can just plug in bare drives very convenient for storage as well as to eSATA to SATA cables we have an IO shield and a third crossfire bridge no that's an esse oh okay that's a straight SLI bridge these are to crossfire bridges and then we have three-way and four-way SLI bridge so that pretty much takes care of the entire accessory package for this particular board and now we will have a look finally at the board itself no I'm lying again okay we're gonna have a look at the extreme cooler that you can actually put on top of the hybrid silent pipe that you can put on top of it this is the same one that we've seen included ever since the x58 extreme a sticker that fell off here okay it supports an extra u connector so the first thing that you should notice about this board if you're a very observant viewer is that it is not a standard ATX board so right here you can see a gap between where normally you'd have the first slot and where the first slot actually is on this boards okay I'm just gonna grab a board my ghetto ancient motherboard that I use to compare size every once in a while so we're gonna just put that over top of the gigabyte ud9 and you can see it's quite a bit longer on the bottom and also quite a bit wider so this is sort of an XL ATX ei TX sort of hybrid form factor board and yeah so that's the first thing that you'll notice you'll also notice it has seven PCI Express 16x slots although they're not all electrical 16x so this one this one this one and this one are all actually wired for 16x while this one this one and this one are only wired for 8x next we have hmm yeah that's pretty cool so that's the cooler that is going to be cooling the the Southbridge as well as the nf 200 chips that power this particular board that's the way that gigabyte was able to achieve so many PCI Express slots you can actually populate every single slot I believe they'll all run at 8x and I don't recall whether it's using 1nf 200 chip or 2nf 200 chips so if you know the answer to that please post it in the comments under the video and I would be eternally grateful so why don't we start at the CPU socket I'll start over again this is an LGA 1366 sockets fairly bog-standard as far as that goes it is a load socket so you don't have to worry about any problems with the CPU contacting the pins correctly if you are concerned about that sort of thing to the left of the socket we have two eight pin EPS connectors so that means you can deliver a whole lot of power to that CPU through this motherboard although you only need to plug in one of them you can see this little sticker S here supports an extra CPU eight pin power connector next we have six ddr3 module slots they are running in triple channel so the first ones you're gonna populate are going to be the white ones and then you'd populate the blue ones it supports up to 24 gigs of memory our 24 pin connectors and it's ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board and also along the right-hand edge of the board and I love this you've got your power and reset switches this is where they belong not at the bottom of the board because whether you're on a test bench or whether you're in a case it's hard to get at switches that are down at the very bottom right of the board this is always easy to access because it's next to your RAM where there won't be a video card or a CPU heatsink overhanging it perfect Thank You gigabyte good work next we have yes four SATA three six gigabit per second ports so the white ones are color-coded four SATA 6 gigabits per second we have an IDE port in between them and then we have six SATA to three gigabit per second ports running off of the Intel Southbridge we have an LED diagnostic the display right here we have our front panel connectors front USB front USB front USB front firewire a floppy connector just in case you are still have a floppy drive and then we have two additional molex connectors so one here at the very bottom left and then one up above the PCI Express slots and those are going to be to provide auxiliary power to a super beefy graphics card configuration that you might want to plug into a board like this so let's have a bit of a closer look at the cool solution I know we looked at the Southbridge cooling before I'm not talking about that chip camera man okay we had a closer look at the Southbridge solution before so that's here that's just a big block of metal basically and then we're gonna be relying on because there isn't actually a whole lot of cooling potential here so if your water cooling this board only the CPU I'd be a little bit concerned because there's a whole lot of stuff here to cool you've got your SATA six could save the six chips up down here you got your South Bridge you got your North Bridge you got an end f200 or two don't forget to write a comment if you know you've got your MOSFETs and that's a whole lot of stuff and you've only got these heat sinks right here and that's pretty much it I mean this doesn't really have any air cooling potential to it it's got like a little tiny heatsink in there but that's not getting any airflow and then this is just a big block of metal so you either need to connect the hybrid silent pipe or you need to connect water cooling to the Northbridge block right here and that's what's going to take care of cooling all of this stuff because it is all connected via heat pipes so as long as you cool this spot right here you make sure you take care of your MOSFETs as well as all of your chipsets on a board like this front audio connector is here and let's have a look at the back connectivity on this motherboard so first of all we've got two ps2 ports personally I think that's necessary I like ps2 ports they're useful yeah it's legacy but I don't think it's that big of a deal next we've got can't remember once it at this angle for some reason alright next we've got digital audio out so we have optical as well as coaxial we have a clear CMOS switch in its absolutely idealist possible location on the back panel you can always reach that no matter what is installed on the board we have two firewire ports we have two USB 2.0 ports two USB 2.0 eSATA combo ports let me just double check that that is indeed what those are yes it is we have two more USB 2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports two Gigabit LAN as well as 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the gigabyte X 58 a ud9 just for scale I'm gonna take the camera man's eye then again and show you just how huge this board is yeah that's right the Southbridge heatsink is like the size of an iPhone