Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the z77 xud 4h from gigabyte this is sort of a lowest that I would recommend motherboard because when you go any lower than this you start to compromise features that matter and this is where you start to get into the features that I think matter the most without spending an exorbitant amount of money on things that most people don't use so for example you've gotten let's support for all the latest core i3 i5 and i7 processors you've got there fully digital power design as well as their 3d dual UEFI BIOS which basically makes it almost impossible to brick one of their boards by flashing the bios or whatever else you get crossfire and SLI compatibility it does support virtue MVP which is basically the way that you can use the onboard graphics on your cpu in order to transcode video and use your dedicated graphics for gaming pcie gen3 is a given these days ultra durable for is pretty much all the old ultra durable stuff in addition to the new blast fabric PCB that makes it humidity resistant all digital power so CPU graphics memory and the uncor as it used to be called I have no idea what we call it now apparently vtt and then they talked a little bit about load line calibration versus not load line calibration although it's very debatable you know lots of people believe you should use it and shouldn't use it here's a closer look at what their PCB design looks like Intel Smart Response allows you to use an SSD to cash your hard drive to make it go faster surprisingly few people use it but they should it's awesome and they're easy Smart Response utility is actually the easiest way to set up Smart Response and it only works on gigabyte boards I have used it before and it's awesome electrostatic protection is cool so what it amounts to is for example many motherboard manufacturers will do one fuse for sort of all bunch of USB ports whereas gigabyte does one fuse purport so if something gets zapped at least you're going to lose less of the functionality of your board included accessories are pretty bare-bones so you got four SATA cables an SLI bridge remember crossfire bridges are included with your graphics card I gigabyte sticker multilingual installation guide book a user's manual a driver disk which you aren't going to use and you're going to download the latest off the manufacturer website and of course a color-coded IO shield look at all that that USB 3 that'd be all over this board because it has not only the intel USB 3 that comes with the z77 chipset but also sent another third-party USB 3 gigabyte has done such a good job of cleaning up their color schemes over the last couple of generations so I'm going to start in the place that I usually do which is the cpu socket got lots of room around there for large coolers as well as lots of cooling for your MOSFETs so it looks like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 so that's probably like an eight plus three phase power design or something along those lines either way it's using gayton thymine yeah quite frankly with an ivy bridge cpu as long as you've got a good quality board which is again why sort of recommend starting at that UD for range you're not going to be limited in your overclocking endeavours by your CPU power delivery unless you're going sub-zero or doing something exotic this is ample for air and water cooling we've got a single 8-pin CPU connector up here which is all you need for an ivy bridge cpu you've got a clear CMOS button as well as a reset switch and the power switch up here at the top right you've got for ddr3 slot supporting up to 32 gigs of ddr3 memory your 24-pin connector and it's ideal slot along the right and you've got an auxiliary aceite connector this is kind of handy if you are installing multiple high-powered graphics card so if you're going to throw a couple gtx 690 s in here or something i do recommend plugging in a SATA connector and it'll give a little bit more power to those graphics card slots and reduce the risk of burning out any of the pins on your 24 pin here front USB 3 is over here on the right this is where I do like to see it although a right angle connector would be even better and over here we've got state of three off the intel chipset say 22 off the intel chipset so two of those and four of those and more say 23 off of a third-party chipset we've also got a front post indicator LED as well as the front panel connectors and the bios switch which switches between bios 1 and bios to which are two physical chips on the board itself three USB to point out here on the bottom as well as the trusted platform module and front panel audio no firewire on this board that's starting to disappear even on fully featured boards like this one and four our pci express slot load out i think it's pretty solid actually so if you have a single dual slot graphics card installed that's going to leave you with one two PCIe you one x two pcie 16x physical and a pci however bear in mind guys that this is 16 x physical if you populate both of these it's going to be 8 x 8 x this is an 8x lot and this one is a 4x that runs off the chipset itself as opposed to off of the cpu so i wouldn't recommend populating this with a graphics card and this pci slot will be covered by a dual graphics card solution but what that means is going to be left with 11 and 4 left for a further expansion which if you're running a dual graphics card setup you probably have a pretty high in computer anyway so I understand gigabytes rationale when they did that in terms of fan connectors we got 124 pin 3 4 pin 4 4 pin 5 4 pin ah ah ah which is pretty good you have full support for configuring those within the BIOS matte black PCB which I've started to take for granted i remember i used to rant and rave about how awesome it is but there are other little details that matter check out the way gigabytes using screws as opposed to plastic push pins to keep on all the cooling that means that no matter what happens in transit your board will probably arrive in a working condition and finally on the back check out all that USB 3 you've got six USB 3.0 ports DVI vga hdmi and displayport out ps2 keyboard mouse combo port is included optical audio out is included to esata ports gigabit ethernet and 7.1 audio and check this out gigabytes also built in a dedicated USB keyboard and mouse ports here this is to increase compatibility as well as sometimes what manufacturers do is they include ports that are optimized for a 1000 Hertz polling rate which gives you that extra little tiny edge in terms of responsiveness assuming your keyboard and mouse do support that feature so high temperature protection on off charge so even if the computers power down you can charge devices using USB and all Japanese solid caps which we've again started to take for granted at this point and oh right don't forget gigabytes 3x power for their USB ports meaning that you can charge device is faster and you can run more devices time pointing at the SATA ports you can run more devices off their USB ports without using a powered hub just passively don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thank you for checking out this one on the z77 x UD 4-h