 Welcome to an unboxing of the first motherboard that I've seen from Gigabyte that has more of a plain slick look to the front of the box versus, well we see back, it's sort of more like the traditional style on the back of the box where it's sort of marketing bullet points on every square centimeter of the packaging. So the front, very clean, very nice, so let's see what they still consider worthwhile to call out on the front in spite of the dramatically reduced amount of text. So this is the X79UD5, which is an X79 board and is sort of an upper to mid-tier board based on that they usually have a UD something below that and usually a UD something above the 5. Patent pending 3D power, 3-way digital engine, so digital CPU power as well as digital memory power times 2. Interesting, they also have their patent pending 3D BIOS. So the 3D BIOS and the 3D power utility are available for download and what this means is it's a very unique way and I haven't seen it in person yet so I can't tell you too much about it but it's a unique way that Gigabyte has implemented their UEFI BIOS. So with previous Gigabyte boards, there's E68 boards, there are P67 boards, they've had UEFI features like support for 3TB plus hard drives but they haven't really looked like a graphical, like a GUI BIOS like the ASUS ones and the MSI ones have. Well now they have a fully graphical BIOS and I am really looking forward to checking it out. Let's see what else they have to say for themselves. So yeah, this is an X79 board which means full support for Intel Core i7s on the LGA 2011 platform. PCI Express Gen 3 is dependent on CPU and expansion card compatibility but it is designed for PCIe Gen 3 which means the switching is all correct. 4 channel DDR3, you can install up to 8 DIMMs so that's up to 64 gigs of memory with the DIMMs that are available today with a Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi card included. On the back we find a whole lot more of Gigabyte what not. So 3-way digital engine means digital memory, digital CPU and digital memory. So A and B mean that's the... sorry. So this is quad channel memory which means there are 4 channels and then you can put up to 2 DIMMs in each channel. So this is going to probably be doing one of the DIMMs in each channel and this will be doing one of the DIMMs in each of the other channels. So that way you have completely different power delivery for each of the channels although it's possible that they've done it for the banks on either side of the memory controller due to the differences in interference for these banks and these banks. I'm not sure which way they've done it either way it means very advanced power management on the motherboard for your memory. 3D power so this is to do with turbo voltage response, you can maintain optimal voltage with load line calibration and real time PWM frequency switching. So these are all features that are possible with a digital PWM. 3D power utility users can now enjoy a fully interactive 3D utility that facilitates adjustment of the three dimensions that control the power delivered to your CPU and memory and voltage, phase and frequency. These parameters are crucial. Okay 3D BIOS so this shows the board here. My understanding is you can actually highlight certain sections of the board and be taken to the pertinent settings for those sections so that's a very different way of doing things for sure. We see traditional gigabyte features like dual BIOS with a switch allowing you to pick between which one you want to boot from. It also gives you a fail safe in case something happens and it gets corrupted. Onboard power OC and reset buttons up to eight slots for maximum capacity. Got it. And ultra durable three which is their two times cost your copper PCB and high quality components. Let's get the actual board opened up I'm sorry that took so long but here we go. That is a very nice looking board. Gigabyte with their LGA 1155 processors really took a major step forward in terms of their board aesthetics and now I'm seeing something actually kind of new in that they're also taking a major step forward with their accessory aesthetics. I remember seeing black PCB three way SLI ready boards that came with these blue SLI bridges. Check this out. Matte black SLI bridge. There you go. That is how it is done. So what else we got in terms of accessories here. We have a flexible two way SLI bridge. We have a flexible black crossfire bridge. All those are looking fine looking good. We have some kind of a cable for plugging in something. We'll find out what that's for later. Got a couple antennas. Okay. We have a front USB three brushed metal sort of looking it's probably brushed plastic but it looks pretty good. And then that's your internal header for USB three here. Ah this is the Bluetooth and what else is on this thing. I think it was a sticker on the front. They decided to include this. So this is a Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi card. Very cool. Open this up. So those two antennas are for this guy. So there's the Bluetooth one and the Wi-Fi antennas. And then let's see. Those are both hooked into the same module here. Looks like there's a USB port on the back here or you can plug it in by front USB which must be what that cable is for. There we go. So this allows you to plug it into the USB header on your motherboard and then you can have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Cool. Alright we got a user manual including your driver's disc. You should download the latest off the Gigabyte website. All that good stuff. GC Wi-Fi installation guide. So here they're going to show you how to do it. Alright so you plug the thing into the thing and then plug the other things into the other thing and it's pretty straightforward. Pretty much what I already explained. Okay what else we got? Multilingual installation guidebook, Gigabyte sticker, Dolby Home Theater sticker. We got one two three four SATA cables. Two are right angle and two are straight two straight. And finally an I.O. shield. And then now. See I lied before. I'm sorry you guys. Now the board itself. I'm just sort of going to make some room here. Make this a platform. And here we go. So this is an LGA 2011 board which means full support for as I said before Core i7, Core i7 Extreme processors on the 2011 socket as well as all the goodies that go along with it. So that starts with the quad channel memory controller. So you would install banks in one two over here three and four. Four channels of memory and then if you wanted to have eight DIMMs then you would afterwards populate the black ones. The reason I would populate the gray ones first is because you can see each of the closest gray ones is slightly further away from the socket than the closest black ones which means that you can install larger CPU coolers without interfering with your RAM. Good thinking Gigabyte. We appreciate those little details very very much. Speaking of little details the 8 pin power connector is at the top left of the board in its exact right correct location where I like to see it. And moving over we've got our power delivery system. So as with all X79 boards this is packed into a very cramped space and I would definitely recommend throwing some active cooling whether it's incidental airflow from your CPU cooler or whether you've got a fan in your case above the board here in order to make sure that that's getting enough cooling. The power switch is in an intelligent location up at the top right because a lot of the times you see them on the very bottoms of the boards and as soon as you install a couple graphics cards you know here and here they're covered and you can't access them anyway. So our 24 pins in its correct location along the right hand edge we've got our front USB 3 header and what I'm going to start calling the correct location along the right hand edge because that's where things plug into the front. We've got 10 SATA ports of some sort or another. So these guys are SATA 3 6 gigabit per second, these are SATA 2 3 gigabit per second and these four are SATA 3 6 gigabit per second as well. So we've got a nice little heatsink on our chipset there, we've got our reset switch, we've got our front panel headers, clear CMOS jumper as well as our dual BIOS's right here. Moving over we've got our powered, our like super powered USB port for charging things like iPads and other tablets. We've got two more front USB 2.0 ports, we have Firewire in case anyone still uses that, we've got our front audio and now let's have a look at the PCIe slot layout. So we've only got 6 PCIe slots which means that, I mean look at how much space they would have had to put a seventh one up there with these memory slots right here. There's just not a lot of space on these X79 boards so a lot of guys are putting 6 slots on so the one here is PCIe 16x, this one here is also wired for 16x and this guy's wired for 8x which means you're going to run 16x, 16x for dual cards or 1688 for triple cards. We've also got two PCIe 1x slots and one legacy PCIe slot in case you still need you know like an old wifi card or sound card or whatever the case may be. Let's go ahead and have a look at the back of the board where we find, oh cool look at that you can select which BIOS you're going to use with a button on the back, that's outstanding. You can also clear the CMOS here and you have your one touch overclocking button here. This is actually a great inclusion to have on the back of the board. This is one of the most multi-colored back panels I think I've seen in quite a while and we're back to the, like check this out, this looks great. You got like black and gray and like gun metal and blue, you know a couple blue accents. And then here it's like back to the circus which is what Gigabyte motherboards used to kind of look like all over them. I don't mind it on the back as long as the color coding sort of makes sense. So we got our PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports, we got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 USB 2.0 ports. We have an eSATA port so that's a USB 2.0 as well as an eSATA port. We have a straight eSATA port so that's two eSATA. We have two USB 3.0, Firewire, Gigabyte Ethernet and finally 7.1 audio out including an optical audio out. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GAX79UD5. Don't forget this supports all the latest goodies including Crossfire SLI, Socket 2011, Quad Channel Memory, PCI Express 3.0 and even Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi and all of that is completely out of the box.