 This is a couple of things. First, it is an exciting new Gigabyte motherboard. Second, it is an exciting new Intel chipset. So this is the same Intel LGA 1155 platform that supports the latest Intel Core i7, Core i5, Core i3 processors. It is made by Gigabyte, who we know and love. It has 16 phases of power, 3 year warranty, ultra durable 3, all those good Gigabyte technologies we like, Nvidia SLI, dual CPU power, interesting. Power engine A and Power engine B, cool. But it has a really cool new feature. This uses the Z68 chipset, so this is the Z68X UD4B3. What that means is that even if you install, okay get this, a PCI Express graphics card or even two, an SLI or Crossfire X, which is compatible with both, you can still use the onboard video on your Intel CPU because they've all got it on the LGA 1155 platform to accelerate things like video rendering. Cool, right? So that is pretty much the killer app that makes the Z68 different from the P67 chipset. So let's take just a brief moment here, talk about some of the other Gigabyte technologies that make this board special. So USB Power 3X is a pretty cool one. Actually here, I'm just going to cheat and look at the box. USB Power 3X, so what that means is you can deliver more power through the USB ports than their competitors. USB 3.0 is awesome, love it. USB 3.0 is also awesome, love it. All ferrite core chokes, all lower RDS MOSFETs, and all 50,000 hour Japanese solid caps, as I mentioned before, 16 phase power, and let me see, 3 plus terabyte hard drives. Oh, and this touch BIOS, so Gigabyte has implemented UEFI BIOS technology now with this line of board. So I don't think there's much here on the back that we really need to talk about. There is one more killer feature of the Z68, but I'm going to talk about it in a little while. That's a hook, so you guys can't go away just yet. Okay, multilingual installation guidebook, user manual, driver DVD, download the latest off the Gigabyte website. Don't install LG 1156 CPUs, they are not compatible. Here is an IO shield. Oh, and the ones with 3X USB power are marked, neat. We have, ooh, black flexible SLI bridge. I love little touches like this where they include, you know, because the last thing we want is, you know, you got like a Schmex-y, you know, great color scheme board and then they go and include like a brown SLI bridge. It's like, that's great. I went and built a high performance system in this and now it has to look stupid. So we've got two right angle SATA cables, two straight SATA cables, also black, to match the entirely black appearance of this high performance Z68 motherboard. So let's go ahead and get this baby out of the packaging here. And there it is. Now, if you guys ever watch my Linus Tech Tips show and you ever pay attention, you might remember one thing that I always talk about first whenever I see it, and that is matte black PCB. Love it. Love everything about it. It looks great. It makes you feel like you just bought a really premium quality product when it has that stealth black look to it. You know, it's not overly shiny, although there are accented shiny bits like the CPU socket, the battery, but other than that, it's just got like a dark stealthy look to it. Love it. Okay. So let's start with the CPU socket. As I mentioned before, LGA1155 socket, fully capable of using the full capabilities of the CPU you put in it, including the CPU cores as well as the GPU core, even when you install another graphics card. So all the P67, all the H67 boards, as soon as you install a graphics card, boom, turns off the onboard video. You can't use Intel's accelerated video encoding software. So that is a great feature to have for this chipset. There is that 16-phase power design, so you can see all of the phases here. You can see the MOSFET coolers are very bulky, very heat piped, very capable looking. Okay. You can see they're going to get some incidental airflow from your CPU fan, no matter how you situate it. Up here in the top right, top left corner, this ideal location is the 8-pin CPU power connector. Here is our CPU fan connector. Over here we find four DDR3 DIMM slots. So those are dual channel. This is the same basic technology we find on the P67 with that onboard video inclusion to the technology list. Here we have our 24-pin connector in its ideal location. Here we find two gigabyte chipset powered SATA 3 ports, two Intel chipset powered SATA 3 ports, as well as four Intel chipset powered SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports. So these are going to be the best ones. I'd use these ones next, and then probably I'd fall back onto those ones, unless you have a bunch of SATA 3 6 gigabit per second drives, in which case I guess you'll need to use these second. Here we have our front panel connectors. Here we have front USB 3. Here we have one, two, three front USB 2s. Here we have front firewire, front audio in its ideal location along the bottom edge of the board, not over here like previous generation gigabyte boards. In terms of expansion ports, we have two PCIe 16x slots, although you can clearly see this one is only wired for 8x. So if you do run Crossfire or SLI, you're going to be running in 8x 8x mode, which doesn't make very much difference in terms of performance. Two PCIe 1x, two PCI. So if you do install SLI or Crossfire with two dual slot cards, you'll be left with one PCIe 1x and one PCI slot for expansion. Here on the back of the board, you will find a whole lot of expansion possibilities. So first things first, we've got one of those PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports, which I'm a big fan of. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight USB 2.0 ports, coaxial and optical audio out, firewire. That is PowerD SATA. Hold on, I think that's PowerD SATA. Let's find out. Nope, that is eSATA 3. Oh, eSATA 3, really? Oh, cool. Well, that's a neat feature. Hold on just a minute here. Well, you know what? Someone leave a comment on the video. Let me know if that is actually a SATA 3 port, because that's pretty neat for external storage if it is. So that is an eSATA 3 slash USB combo port, and then this one is just a straight eSATA 3. Here's USB 3.0, gigabit ethernet, as well as 7.1 audio out. And I actually, you know what? It's kind of funny, but I like the... This is almost like harkening back to the old gigabyte days where their boards had the explosion of color on them. Here, the board looks awesome, which is great, so it means your system's going to look great. And then at the back, they've gone back to the old gigabyte ways, which I actually kind of like. It's kind of a nice little touch, like old school style. We've got just a little bit of that gigabyte flare on the back of the system where it's... I don't have to look at it unless I'm trying to plug in a port, in which case color coding everything helps a lot. It's great. Now, I haven't talked about that other feature yet. I've been saving it, and let's see what Intel Smart Response Technology is, what we're calling it. So basically, what Intel Smart Response Technology allows us to do is it allows us to plug in an SSD into one of the Intel ports and a hard drive, and then use the SSD as a cache. So we've had products that have used this kind of technology in the past, such as the Seagate Momentus XT, which had a built-in very small SSD, such as the HDD Boost from Silverstone, which allowed you to mount an SSD and then use a passthrough to run to a hard drive. But this is the first time we've seen it natively included on a chipset. So the Z68 chipset has the graphics feature, which is very, very important, and then it also has the ability to use an SSD as a cache for your hard drive. So what that means is if you buy a small SSD, rather than installing your OS, installing one game on it, and then going, oh, where'd all my space go? Now I can't put anything else on my SSD. Instead, you put on the SSD. It hides itself from you completely. You plug in your hard drive. You bind them together. I haven't actually tried it yet, so I don't know how it works. But you do that. You have the full capacity of your hard drive, and then the system will intelligently store your most frequently accessed files and programs onto the SSD so you can more quickly access those. Gigabyte claims up to a four-time system performance increase than with a hard drive only. So that's very cool. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Z68X UD4-B3 from Gigabyte. 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