Gadgetory

welcome to an unboxing of the first motherboard that I've seen from gigabyte that has more of a plain slick look to the front of the box vs well we see it back it's sort of more like the traditional style on the back of the box where it's sort of marketing bullet points on every square centimeter of the packaging so the front very clean very nice so let's see what they still consider worthwhile to call it on the front in spite of the dramatically reduced amount of text so this is the x79 you d 5 which is an x 79 board and it's sort of an upper upper to mid-tier board based on that they usually have a UD something below that and usually aud something above the five patent pending 3d power three-way digital engines the digital CPU power as well as digital memory power times to interesting they also have their patent pending 3d bios so the 3d bios and the 3d power utility of are available for download and what this means is it's a very unique way and I haven't seen it in person yet so I can't tell you too much about it but it's a unique way that gigabyte has implemented their UEFI BIOS so with previous gigabyte boards 3068 boards they're p67 boards they've had UEFI features like support for 3 terabyte plus hard drives but they haven't really looked like a graphical like a GUI BIOS like the sous ones on the MS islands have well now they have a fully graphical BIOS and I am really looking forward to checking it out let's see what else they have to say for themselves so yeah this is an x 79 board which means full support for intel core i7s on the LGA 2011 platform PCI Express gen3 is dependent on cpu and expansion card compatibility but it is designed for pcie gen3 which means the switching is all correct for channel ddr3 you can install up to 8 dim so that's up to 64 gigs of memory with the dims that are available today with a Bluetooth 4.1 Wi-Fi card included on the back we find a whole lot more of gigabyte whatnot so three way to doodle engine means digital memory digital CPU and digital memory so a and B mean that some that's the story so this is quad channel memory which means there are four channels and then you can put up to two dimms in each channel so this is going to probably be doing one of the dims in each Channel and this will be doing one of the dims in each of the other channels so that way you have completely different power delivery for each of the channels although it's possible that they've done it for the banks on either side of the memory controller due to the differences in interference for these banks and these banks I'm not sure which way they've done it either way it means very advanced power management on the motherboard for your memory 3d power so this is to do with turbo voltage response you can maintain optimal voltage with load line calibration and real-time PWM frequency switching so these are all features that are possible with a digital PWM 3d power utility users can now enjoy a fully interactive 3d utility that facilitates adjustment of the three dimensions that control the power delivered to your CPU and memory and voltage phase and frequency these parameters are crucial ok 3d bios so this shows the board here I've my understanding is you can actually highlight certain sections of the board and be taken to the pertinent settings for those sections that's a very different way of doing things for sure we see traditional gigabyte features like dual BIOS with a switch allowing you to pick between which one you want to boot from it also gives you a fail-safe in case something happens and it gets corrupted onboard power OC and reset buttons up to eight slots for maximum capacity got it and ultra durable 3 which is there two times classroom proper PCB and high quality components so let's get the actual board opened up I'm sorry that took so long but here we go that is a very nice looking bored gigabyte with their LGA 1155 processors really took a major step forward in terms of their board aesthetics and now I'm seeing something actually kind of new and that they're also taking a major step forward with their accessory aesthetics I remember seeing black PCB 3-way sli ready boards that came with these blue SLI bridges check this out matte black SLI bridge there you go that is how it is done so what else we got in terms of accessories here we have a flexible two-way SLI bridge we have a flexible black crossfire bridge all those are looking fine looking good we have some kind of a cable for plugging in something we'll find out with that score later got a couple antennas ok we have a front USB 3 brushed metal third of looking it's probably brushed plastic but it looks pretty good and then that's your internal header for USB 3 here ah this is the double YouTube and what else is on this thing I think it was a sticker on the front they decided to include this so this is a Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi card very cool looking this up so those two antennas are for this guy so there's the Bluetooth one and the Wi-Fi antennas and then let's see those they're both hooked into the same module here looks like there's a USB port on the back here or you can plug it in by front USB which must be what that cables for there we go so this allows you to plug it into the USB header on your motherboard and then you can have Bluetooth Wi-Fi cool all right we got a user manual including your drivers disc used to download the latest off the gigabyte website all that good stuff GC Wi-Fi installation guide so here they're going to show you how to do it all right so you plug the thing into the thing and then plug the other things into the other thing and it's pretty straightforward pretty much what I already explained ok what else we got multilingual installation guide book gigabyte stickered will be home theater sticker we got one two three four SATA cables to a right angle and to our straight to straight and finally an i/o shield and then now see I lied before I'm sorry you guys now the board itself I'm just started going to make some room here this is a platform and here we go so this is an LGA 2011 board which means full support for as i said before core i7 for i7 extreme processors on the 2011 socket as well as all the goodies that go along with it so that starts with the quad channel memory controller so you would install banks in one two over here three and four four channels of memory and then if you wanted to have eight dims then you would afterwards populate the black ones the reason I would populate the gray ones first is because you can see each of the closest gray ones is slightly further away from the socket than the closest black ones which means that you can install larger CPU coolers without interfering with your RAM good thinking gigabyte we appreciate those little details very very much speaking of little details the eight pin power connector is at the top left of the board and its exact right correct location where I like to see it and moving over we've got our power delivery system so as with all x79 boards this is packed into a very cramped space and I would definitely recommend throwing some active cooling whether it's incidental air flow from your cpu cooler or whether you got a fan in your case above the board here in order to make sure that that's getting enough cooling the power switch is in an intelligent location up at the top right because a lot of the times you see them on the very bottom of the boards and as soon as you install a couple graphics cards you know here and here they're covered and you can't access them anyway so our 24 pins in its correct location along the right-hand edge we've got our front USB 3 header and what I'm going to start calling the correct location along the right-hand edge because that's where things plug into the front we've got 10 saitta ports of some sort or another so these guys are say 236 gigabit per second these are say two to three gigabit per second and these four are say 236 gigabit per second as well so we've got a nice little heat sink on our chipset there we've got a reset switch we've got our front panel headers clear CMOS jumper as well as our dual bios's right here moving over we've got our powered or like super powered USB port for charging things like iPads and other tablets we've got two more front USB 2.0 ports we have firewire in case anyone still uses that we've got our front audio and now let's have a look at the PCIe slot layout so we've only got six pcie slots which means that I mean I mean look at look at how much space they would have had to put a seven-point up there with these memory slots right here there's just not a lot of space on these x79 board so a lot of guys are putting six slots on so the one here is pcie 16x this one here is also wired for 16 x and this guy's wired for 8 x which means you're going to run 16 x 16 x for duel cards or eight are 16 884 triple cards we've also got to pc at you One X lots and one legacy pci slot in case you still need you know like an old Wi-Fi card or sound card or whatever the case may be let's go ahead and have a look at the back of the board where we find oh look at that you can select which bio so you're going to use with a button on the back that's outstanding you can also clear the CMOS here and you have your OneTouch overclocking button here this is this is actually a great inclusion to have on the back of the board this is one of those multicolored back panels i think i've seen in quite a while over back to the like check deck this up this looks great you got like black and grey and like gunmetal and blue you know a couple blue accents and then here it's like back to the circuits which is what gigabyte motherboards used to used to kind of look like all over them but I don't mind it on the back as long as the color coding sort of makes sense so we got our ps2 keyboard mouse combo ports we got one two three four five six seven eight USB 2.0 ports we have an e SATA port so that's the USB 2.0 port we have a straight a' SATA port so that's two e-sata we have two USB 3.0 firewire gigabit ethernet and finally 7.1 audio out including an optical audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the ga x79 you d 5 don't forget this supports all the latest goodies including crossfire sli socket 2011 quad channel memory pci express 3.0 and Wi-Fi and all of that is completely out of the book