Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the gigabyte z77 x up5 th this is one of the first boards with the all-new ultra durable 5 which is ultra cool professional to performance and finally ultra current high current capability should be ultra current capability because check this up they're using an all-new power delivery system that is basically as expensive to implement on a motherboard as like building another low-cost motherboard and like giving it to you at the same time as you buy this month for it is extremely expensive on gigabyte side but it is unprecedented in terms of the power delivery that it can achieve there's no coil line it runs cooler which should achieve better overclocking because having those hot VRMs all you know up in your cpu socket area is not helping things stay cooler on more traditional power delivery systems so let's go through some of the other stuff you got support for all the latest until Core i3 i5 and i7 processors there UEFI 3d 3d BIOS as well as their 3d power which is all digital power for the CPU the memory as well as the the uncork this board supports Thunderbolt so we'll talk more about that later and it comes with a 300 megabit per second dual band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 card because it is ultra durable in general it has their 2x copper PCB as well as their glass fabric PCB which offers humidity protection if you live somewhere very humid such as in Southeast Asia for example where you know just general humidity in the air can eventually cause problems for some computer components so here we can see what gigabyte has to say about their single package design with their industry-leading 60 amp rated power stage which is a phenomenal amount of power to be able to deliver to a CPU I mean you might even go as far as to say totally unnecessary but if you want to get the best overclocks every little bit helps so traditional MOSFETs are hot lower RDS on MOSFETs are cooler and their new power stage MOSFETs are the coolest so this is all taken with thermal imaging configuration ok overclocking stability okay good and excellent so if you overheat ah yes this is interesting so if the power delivery system runs cooler it actually also runs more efficiently and we're Stavely so that's that's just a general function the fact that it can deliver more power stabili of the fact that it does run cooler dual UEFI bios means that even if you have some kind of a failure while you're flashing the bios you can recover it quite easily using their utility you've also got power failure protection so they build this into the board itself so that even if there's some kind of a problem with a short they have fuses built in that will potentially protect the parts dual Thunderbolt is built in the dual 10 gigabit per second capability so if you want to plug in like you know a dozen Thunderbolt devices daisy-chaining all over the place and have 20 gigabit per second data to the whole thing then you can go ahead and do that soundblaster x-fi is built-in and that pretty much does it for the box let's open this bad boy up and I just love gigabytes styling these days I mean honestly some of their some of their g1 series stuff doesn't really do it for me with like guns and whatnot on it but they're they're out there they're just they're UD series boards are just oh they're just like look at this matte black PCB every possible feature without overdoing it on the PCB size so this is a standard ATX configuration they also have built in the fall sevens lots of expansion in spite of all the extra functionality that's on this particular board let's start unpacking some of the accessories here so you guys to have a look at them great accessory package including that fabulous gigabyte stickers flexible black sli bridge the very best time clean IO shield with color coating on the appropriate parts a USB cable probably from something I think it's for this guy and we are ready to go through it so we've also got a user's manual with driver disk for a variety of things just download the latest off the gigabyte website as well as a user's manual for what is presumably the wireless card setting up the software and a multilingual installation guide book that you probably don't need if you watch the lioness detector or rather NCIX tech tips video on how to how to build your new PC so yeah that's USB right there so that can plug into any one of the PCIe 1x slots and here's something cool about gigabytes implementation of their Wi-Fi bluetooth module this is just a Wi-Fi bluetooth module I've seen a soos do this before where they include some kind of a module that fits on the board but they actually put all the logic on the board itself so that you can't just take the card as an extra value add and install it in one of your other pcs if you want so kudos to gigabyte for giving users the flexibility to you know maybe in five years when they're not using this board anymore to still have you know a Wi-Fi Bluetooth module yeah but they can continue to use also nice finishing touches black PCB even on the add-in card so many times I've seen you know like a gorgeous-looking board like this and they include like an ugly Brown sli bridge or they include like little add-in card that's got like a green or brown PCB on it nope not gigabyte they are not about that these days six SATA 3 6 gigabit connects six gigabit per second cables you've got a front USB 3.0 three and a half inch Bay device so if your case it doesn't support front USB 3 then you'll have it I think that covers pretty much all this stuff antennas so those are the dual antennas for your dual band Wi-Fi and now let's get along to the board itself so this thing has everything there are those premium power phases that are just baller as heck because yeah I'm I'm totally I'm totally down for those there's your CPU sockets so again you know all the latest processors if you want to overclock make sure you get a K series processor because those are the ones that are going to allow you to crank up the voltage crank up the multiplier and really get the best results so anything case series this board is probably gonna be wasted on it your 8 pin power connectors and it's ideal location and the top left of the board and you've got your full support for the usual up to 32 gigs so 4 by 8 gig dual channel memory your onboard switches are all up here perfect this is this is perfect so the three most clear reset and power and instead of having them down here where as soon as you load a couple graphics cards into it you can't really reach them this is the ideal location for an open test bench all your voltage check points are right here so you can use a multimeter in order to check any one of these different things including your V core as well as your interview memory controller all that good stuff your memory moving down to along the right-hand edge you got your 20 4 pin connector it's ideal location post LED again this is a much better location than down here because you can actually see it whoa check this out you guys three one two three front panel USB three headers that is absolutely outstanding I don't think I've seen that before auxiliary SATA power connector so this do not plug this out to a drive that is not how this works this is auxiliary power for your PCI Express slot so you plug SATA power into this to say two three six gigabit per second ports for say two to three gigabit per second parts all on a right angle in their ideal locations you've got an additional SATA port so this is a SATA 3 16 bit per second and that's probably the same chipset that's power in the eSATA on the back of the board PCI Express slot layout is pretty good actually so you've got on your One X and throw your Wi-Fi module in there your dual slot card will then cover that which will leave you with a 1 X slot yeah an 8 X electrical slot a PCI slot just in case you still got something legacy you want to use as well as a PCIe 4x slot so these are physical 16 but they're wired for either 16 8 8 or 8 8 4 and this 4 is running off the chipset so it's a little bit slower not ideal for SLI or crossfire configuration for all intents and purposes this is a 2-way SLI in to a crossfire board although 3-way crossfire is supportive front panel connectors are here as well as there's your high power USB 2 front panel header your normal USB 2 front panel header but this one is better for charging things like iPads or other tablets trusted platform module front panel firewire front audio and then here is yo leave your onboard audio whether you're on board on audio stuff this this is cool so this M SATA port actually maybe that's what that I don't know what that's doing that probably powers down one of these SATA ports so yeah port 5 where 5 turns off if you populate this so you can use this for things like Smart Response technology or even just as a regular SSD it's totally up to the individual end-user so where's our Thunderbolt chips I mean there you go right there so there's your Thunderbolt chipset close to the Thunderbolt ports as you'd expect remember guys Thunderbolt won't work unless you're using the Intel onboard audio so that means you can either use lucid virtu MVP which allows you to use the onboard audio for what it's good at which is things like video transcoding and making sure you're using Thunderbolt and then you can use your dedicated video to power any kind of 3d games even if you're running the display off of the thunderbolt port in terms of i/o you've got lots of different onboard display options a VGA DVI HDMI and remember these Thunderbolt ports can also terminate to mini DisplayPort so that's effectively all the major players for USB 3.0 ports which gives you a total of 10 10 USB 3.0 ports potentially can run off this board 2 USB 2.0 ports which are great for legacy devices like if you need to use a bootable USB or something like that it tends to have a slightly better compatibility same thing with like keyboards and mice so I'm glad they're still including those Gigabit Ethernet as well as optical audio out and 7.1 audio out the back of the board is pretty much what you'd expect so you got a couple of cooling heat sinks here as well as your backplate and using all screws all hard mounts for all of the front components of the board so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at gigabytes GA z77 x up5 th this has a few firsts including its dual thunderbolt ports don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos