Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of yet another z77 board this one took me a little bit longer sorry about that but here we are this is the Z 77 X UD 3h gigabytes whole slogan for this is insist on ultra durable so they mean a new version of ultra durable ultra durable has been through a number of revisions so it started with the two x copper PCB which is better for heat dissipation as well as for performance and it's now up to ultra durable 4 which includes high temperature protection humidity protection with their new glass fabric PCB which apparently allows it to be more resistant to humidity and moisture next is their electrostatic protection as well as power failure protection so that is ultra durable according to gigabyte and they want you to insist on an ultra durable motherboard for your new PC we also see a couple other focus things here that is their patent-pending 3d power all digital engine so that means all aspects of your CPU and memory are being powered and digitally so that is your onboard GPU your on core your core your memory all of that good stuff very cool as well as their 3d bios so what they mean by 3d bios is cool UEFI bios that is graphical interface bios that has kind of a unique interface i think they have you usually have a picture of it yeah so there's a picture of it here so they show you like a picture of a motherboard and you just click on the SATA ports if you want to change something about your boot order or whatever and it's it's very graphical so if you want to change something but your CPU or memory you click on the CPU socket it gives you all the relevant options in one place so this is a LGA 1155 board with the z77 chipset which means we've got support for all that cool z77 stuff including PCI Express gen3 as well as Intel's Intel's onboard USB 3 ports so that is to the front ports and two rear ports are going to be powered by the Intel chipset we've got virtue MVP which is an upgraded version of lucid virtu which allows you to use the onboard GPU that's built in the cpu to do things like transcoding video which is very very fast compared to the traditional methods but still take advantage of the dedicated graphics card for 3d games crossfire and SLI are both supported as well as the MCU onboard connector but I'll show you more about that in just a moment so all digital power there you go CPU graphics memory and vtt and what else we got load line calibration okay most modern boards that are somewhat decent per overclocking do have load line calibration this is a good one smart response so gigabyte has a much easier way than their competitors of setting up smart response that's basically like two clicks on a little application that you download it's really really simple to set up remember Smart Response allows you to take up to a sixty gig SSD and use it as a cache for your boot hard drive or any other hard drive I guess although I'm not convinced that it makes much sense to use it on something that's not a boot drive unless maybe you play like mmo's or whatever your MMO installed on a separate drive and then that way Smart Response will make sure that you've got all of the most relevant things that you use most frequently fashioned to the SSD so okay I guess I could kind of see that most games don't benefit much from an SSD in terms of on loading times though so just something to be aware of I would usually use my response for the boot drive right accessories for SATA cables two of them are right angle two of them are not right angle we've got a flexible black sli bridge exactly the right kind we have an IO shield a multilingual installation guidebook in a user's manual including a DVD with utilities and drivers but you shouldn't use and you should download the latest off the gigabyte website here is the board itself gigabyte does such a good job of their board aesthetics these days we've got just a nice slick of black white and blue color scheme don't worry these are stickers these are stickers this isn't a sticker this is my one complaint actually about the x79 board that I'm using in my system right now it looks so sleek except for BAM orange light red button so what I'm probably gonna do on on that board is just paint over it and black nail polish or something like that and it'll be all good so there's the LGA 1155 socket supporting second generation and third generation Intel or processors code-named Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge as well as our power delivery with kind of a neat looking little heatsink II thing going on with depth like an arrow going on in the middle and wavy looking fan of things the the TDP of the CPUs that go in here is 77 watts for Ivy Bridge or 95 watts for Sandy Bridge so we don't need a ton of power delivery we've got an 8 pin power connector anyway and it's in its ideal location up at the top left of the board speaking of ideal locations I'm personally a big fan of having the power button up here as opposed to down here the onboard power button the reason for that is that this is easier to reach when you have a couple graphics cards installed which sometimes I do we've also got our CMOS switch button as well as our reset switch arsenal's CMOS which I think they made see most clear switch least I hope that's what they mean there's another clear CMOS down here you know what give me a woman here guys I'm gonna try and figure this out so this is fairly straightforward that is the CMOS clear switch this guy right here switches you between the main BIOS on the back up BIOS so that's more of like a CMO or like a BIOS chip switch and then this one these two jumpers right here are a clear CMOS jumper as well so you've got a multitude of different ways to manage the BIOS or the UAF I should probably stop calling in a BIOS it's not really called that anymore of this motherboard your 24 pin connectors and it's ideal location along the right-hand edge and you've got another auxilary connector here so that's kind of interesting someone actually messaged me not that long ago saying that their friend had misunderstood when I was talking about one of these connectors on the x58 OC board from gigabyte and had thought that he could plug his hard drive into it that's not how it works this is auxilary par for the motherboard using a SATA power connector from your power supply so it's if you have multiple graphics cards installed just for additional stability I can't imagine you'd need it on this board but it's there if you want it we've got to say two three six gigabit per second ports powered by the Intel chipset as well as 4 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports please note SATA port 5 that is their numbered 0 to 5 so the last one is going to be disabled if you something into the mSATA slot here so M SATA is a standard that's used for SSDs particularly useful if you want to run Intel Smart Response technology without actually plugging an SSD into a bay in your case you can just clip it in right there it's just running at SATA to three gigabit per second mode we have a post debug led which has all the codes outlined in the manual we have our front panel connectors for your power and your reset and all that good stuff front panel USB - I couldn't help noticing the absence of one of their super charging USB ports so that's that's kind of interesting I guess that's a feature this board doesn't have that the higher-end board does have a very useful one indeed it does have on/off charge though it means that you can't charge your devices even though the system is powered off we've also got a front panel audio header in its ideal location at the bottom left of the board and in terms of PCI Express slot layout we have something that actually looks pretty good so if you have a low-end system that is to say one graphics card your PCI slot will be accessible which stands to reason whereas if you do a high-end configuration with dual PCIe graphics cards it will cover that PCI slot so they kind of aim it towards the higher end the build you go for on this the fewer legacy PCI slots will be available which kind of makes sense so if you do install dual graphics cards you're gonna be left with one two PCIe 1x as well as a PCIe 8 X a PCIe and our sorry ended and a PCIe 4x so if you're running sli or crossfire these two are gonna run an 8x8 X mode but remember that's PCIe gen3 with an Ivy Bridge CPU which means that the bandwidth is equivalent to PCIe gen - 16 X I forgot to mention earlier that ddr3 dual channel is supported up to 4 dims and remember guys Ivy Bridge CPUs will also unlock a plethora of hahaha I think that's the first time I've used that word on tech tips of new memory speeds that were not available on Sandy Bridge CPUs now the back of the board we find a few interesting things so one of them is a ps2 keyboard mouse combo port still like to see those 1 2 3 4 5 6 USB 3.0 ports these two of them are running off the Intel chipset and four of them are not now I have a concern about the fact that this board doesn't have any USB 2 ports because from time to time USB three drivers are not going to be automatically installed by your OS which means that if you're operating all of your peripheral is based on the back panel ports and you haven't installed the driver for those ports yet your keyboard and mouse might not work so I would definitely recommend if you have one of these boards and you're having trouble with it just use one of your front headers plug into your front USB 2 in order to get up and running and then install your drivers and then these should all work just fine we've also got VGA DVI HDMI and DisplayPort out options remember with Ivy Bridge you can support up to three displays out at a time even on onboard graphics optical audio out dual eSATA Gigabit Ethernet as well as 7.1 analog audio out round out the i/o options on this board nice little touches matte black PCB using proper screws to attach all of the coolers on this board in spite of the fact that it is a UD three level board so this is not a premium level board another nice touch is the fact that they have included SLI support even though this is a more value segmented board as well as oh yeah there's the front USB 3 which I don't think I ever showed you so finally last but not least we have one two three four five wow that's actually not bad five four pin pwm fan headers and don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips from our boxing's reviews and other computer videos