 Now this is one of the cooler and more innovative Z68 boards out there. This is the Z68 XP UD3 from Gigabyte. Gigabyte's usually pretty good at calling out their key features on the packaging, so here you can see it's the biggest feature there. There's an onboard M-SATA connector. So what that means is you can use Intel's SRT caching feature using a little onboard M-SATA drive rather than installing an SSD in the actual system drive bay. So it's very, very compact, very, very cool feature. Okay, so it has a three-year warranty in the USA and Canada. It has Ultra Durable 3, supports NVIDIA SLI as well as AMD Crossfire X. It uses Touch BIOS to support 3TB plus drives. It also has dual BIOS, which enables you to restore the BIOS even if you corrupt it during a flash, driver MOSFETs, all ferrite core chokes, all lower RDS MOSFETs, and all 50,000 hour Japanese caps mean that even though this is a UD3 value board, it has very high build quality. Finally, up to four times faster performance using Intel SRT technology means that you can install that M-SATA SSD, get way better performance, and you don't actually have to buy a high capacity SSD for your system. Let's see if there's anything on the back. They have to say for themselves, 3X USB power is a great feature. It allows you to run a hub or run higher powered devices off of your USB ports. It does support USB 3 as well as SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second. So let's get this baby opened up. Here's our little guide telling you not to install an 1156 CPU. That's good advice. We have a user's manual, an I.O. shield with color coding, as well as a driver DVD, which you should throw away and download the latest off the Gigabyte website. Intel Smart Response Technology, so up to four times faster performance. This actually has a basis in reality, unlike some manufacturer claims on products. Yes, it does perform way faster using an SSD as a cache than with only a hard drive. You've got a multilingual installation guidebook, dual-B home theater sticker, as well as a powered by Gigabyte sticker, an SLI connector, black, flexible, my favorite kind, as well as two straight and two right angle SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second cables. Here on the motherboard itself, we find a motherboard. Actually give me a second, I'm having a little bit of trouble getting this out. Why don't we try from the other side? Yeah, there we go. OK, so let's take it out of the package. Now this is a value oriented board, but high build quality and good features mean that you can actually build a very, very decent system around something like this. Throw a 2500K in there. Oh, give me a sec. Throw 8 gigs of RAM in there, throw a GTX 560 or an HT6870, something along those lines, you've got a very potent little gaming system. So here you can see the power design is a 6 plus 1 phase power. We've also got a nice little MOSFET cooling heat sink up here. In terms of the overall layout, it's pretty standard. You've got your LGA1155 socket supporting Core i3, i5, and i7 processors. You've got your 8 pin power in its ideal location up at the top left edge. You've got support for dual channel DDR3 memory. These are clearly color coded, so you won't install them in the wrong slots. Your 24 pin power is all along the right hand edge in its also ideal location. We have 8 SATA ports. OK, so these guys are running off a third party chipset. Those are SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports. These are running off the Intel chipset, all 6 of these. The white ones are SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second. And the blue ones are SATA 2, 3 gigabits per second. And apparently SATA port 5 will be disabled when the M SATA slot is in use. So those are wired up to the same port on the chipset itself in all likelihood. Here's your front panel connectors. Here's your front USB 3. There's the front powered USB 2, so that can be used to charge tablets even, high powered devices. And we have two more front USB headers, front firewire as well as a front audio header. In terms of the PCI slot layout, we've got a pretty good layout here. We've got two PCIe 16x slots, although this one is wired only for 8x. So if you're running SLI or Crossfire, you're going to be running at 8x, 8x speeds. We've got two, one, two, three PCIe 1x and two PCI. Now if you install two dual slot cards, you're going to be left with one PCI and two PCIe 1x slots. And here is the M SATA Intel Smart Response Technology port here. So you just use the little retention clips. You plug in an SSD there and you can use that SSD in order to act as a cache for a hard drive that you're using as your system boot drive. So that's in some ways a little bit more convenient and a little bit lower profile than actually installing a separate drive, running a separate cable, and that's kind of more of a hassle than this. Okay. So in the back, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight USB 2.0 ports, a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, optical audio out, Firewire HDMI, two USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet and 7.1 audio. Now this HDMI port is very useful because you can use it in order to run Lucid Virtue, which means you can use the onboard video on your CPU for things like transcoding and use the dedicated graphics installed down here for your gaming needs. Now the fan headers on this particular motherboard. We've got our CPU four pin PWM up here. We've got a three pin right here. We've got a three pin here, a four pin PWM down here, and that's pretty much it. This is a value board, so you tend to see a little bit less in terms of things like fan headers. 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