 Welcome to my unboxing of yet another Z77 board. This one took me a little bit longer. Sorry about that, but here we are. This is the Z77X UD3H Gigabytes Hole slogan for this is insist on ultra durable. So they mean a new version of ultra durable. Ultra durable has been through a number of revisions, so it started with the 2x copper PCB, which is better for heat dissipation as well as for performance. And it's now up to ultra durable for which includes high temperature protection, humidity protection with their new glass fabric PCB, which apparently allows it to be more resistant to humidity and moisture. Next is their electrostatic protection as well as power failure protection. So that is ultra durable according to Gigabyte and they want you to insist on an ultra durable motherboard for your new PC. We also see a couple other focus things here, that is their patent pending 3D power, all digital engines, so that means all aspects of your CPU and memory are being powered digitally. So that is your onboard GPU, your on-core, your core, your memory, all of that good stuff. Very cool. As well as their 3D BIOS. So what they mean by 3D BIOS is Dual UEFI BIOS, that is graphical interface BIOS that has kind of a unique interface. I think they have, we usually have a picture of it, yeah, so there's a picture of it here. So they show you like a picture of a motherboard and you just click on the SATA ports if you want to change something about your boot order or whatever. And it's very graphical, so if you want to change something about your CPU or memory, you click on the CPU socket and it gives you all the relevant options in one place. So this is an LGA1155 board with the Z77 chipset, which means we've got support for all that cool Z77 stuff, including PCI Express Gen 3, as well as Intel's onboard USB 3 ports, so that is two of the front ports and two rear ports are going to be powered by the Intel chipset. We've got Virtue MVP, which is an upgraded version of Lucid Virtue, which allows you to use the onboard GPU that's built into the CPU to do things like transcoding video, which is very, very fast compared to the traditional methods, but still take advantage of a dedicated graphics card for 3D games. Crossfire and SLI are both supported, as well as the MSATA onboard connector, but I'll show you more about that in just a moment. So all digital power, there you go, CPU, graphics, memory and VTT. And what else we got? Load line calibration. Okay, most modern boards that are somewhat decent for overclocking do have load line calibration. This is a good one. Smart response. So Gigabyte has a much easier way than their competitors of setting up smart response. It's basically like two clicks on a little application that you download. It's really, really simple to set up. Remember, smart response allows you to take up to a 60 gig SSD and use it as a cache for your boot hard drive or any other hard drive, I guess, although I'm not convinced that it makes much sense to use it on something that's not a boot drive. Unless maybe you play like MMOs or whatever, you have your MMO installed on a separate drive. And then that way, smart response will make sure that you've got all of the most relevant things that you use most frequently cached into the SSD. So okay, I guess I could kind of see that. Most games don't benefit much from an SSD in terms of loading times though. So just something to be aware of. I would usually use smart response for the boot drive. Right, accessories. Four SATA cables. Two of them are right angle. Two of them are not right angle. We've got a flexible black SLI bridge, exactly the right kind. We have an IO shield, a multilingual installation guidebook and a user's manual, including a DVD with utilities and drivers, which you shouldn't use and you should download the latest off the Gigabyte website. Here is the board itself. Gigabyte does such a good job of their board aesthetics these days. We've got just a nice slick black, white and blue color scheme, don't worry. These are stickers. These are stickers. This isn't a sticker. This is my one complaint actually about the X79 board that I'm using in my system right now. It looks so sleek except for, bam, orange light, red button. So what I'm probably going to do on that board is just paint over it and black nail polish or something like that and it'll be all good. So there's the LG 1155 socket supporting second generation and third generation Intel Core processors, codenamed Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge, as well as our power delivery with kind of a neat looking little heat sinky thing going on. It's got like an arrow going on in the middle and some wavy looking kind of things. The TDP of the CPUs that go in here is 77 watts for Ivy Bridge or 95 watts for Sandy Bridge so we don't need a ton of power delivery. We've got an 8 pin power connector anyway and it's in its ideal location up at the top left of the board. Speaking of ideal locations, I'm personally a big fan of having the power button up here as opposed to down here, the onboard power button. The reason for that is that this is easier to reach when you have a couple graphics cards installed, which sometimes I do. We've also got our CMOS switch button as well as our reset switch. CMOS switch. I think they mean CMOS clear switch. At least I hope that's what they mean. There's another clear CMOS down here. You know what? Give me a moment here guys. I'm going to try and figure this out. So this is fairly straightforward. That is the CMOS clear switch. This guy right here switches you between the main BIOS and the backup BIOS. So that's more of like a BIOS chip switch. And then this one, these two jumpers right here are a clear CMOS jumper as well. So you've got a multitude of different ways to manage the BIOS or the UEFI. I should probably stop calling it a BIOS. It's not really called that anymore. Of this motherboard. Your 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right hand edge and you've got another auxiliary connector here so that's kind of interesting. Someone actually messaged me not that long ago saying that their friend had misunderstood when I was talking about one of these connectors on the X58 OC board from Gigabyte and had thought that he could plug his hard drive into it. That's not how it works. This is auxiliary power for the motherboard using a SATA power connector from your power supply. So it's if you have multiple graphics cards installed just for additional stability. I can't imagine you'd need it on this board but it's there if you want it. We've got two SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports powered by the Intel chipset as well as four SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports. Please note SATA port 5 that is they're numbered zero to five so the last one is going to be disabled if you plug something into the M SATA slot here. So M SATA is a standard that's used for SSDs. Particularly useful if you want to run Intel smart response technology without actually plugging an SSD into a bay in your case. You can just clip it in right there. It's just running at SATA 2 3 gigabit per second mode. We have a post debug LED which has all the codes outlined in the manual. You have our front panel connectors for your power and your reset and all that good stuff. Front panel USB 2. I couldn't help noticing the absence of one of their super charging USB ports. So that's kind of interesting. I guess that's a feature this board doesn't have that the higher end board does have. A very useful one indeed. It does have on off charge though which means that you can charge your devices even when the system is powered off. We've also got a front panel audio header in its ideal location at the bottom left of the board. And in terms of PCI Express slot layout we have something that actually looks pretty good. So if you have a low end system that is to say one graphics card your PCI slot will be accessible which stands to reason. Whereas if you do a high end configuration with dual PCIe graphics cards it will cover that PCI slot. So they kind of aim it towards the higher end of build you go for on this the fewer legacy PCI slots will be available which kind of makes sense. So if you do install dual graphics cards you're going to be left with one PCIe 1x as well as a PCIe 8x and a PCIe 4x. So if you run an SLI or Crossfire these two are going to run in 8x 8x mode but remember that's PCIe Gen 3 with an Ivy Bridge CPU which means that the bandwidth is equivalent to PCIe Gen 2 16x. I forgot to mention earlier that DDR3 dual channel is supported up to 4 DIMMs and remember guys Ivy Bridge CPUs will also unlock a plethora of haha I think that's the first time I've used that word on Tech Tips of new memory speeds that were not available on Sandy Bridge CPUs. Now at the back of the board we find a few interesting things so one of them is a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port still like to see those 1 2 3 4 5 6 USB 3.0 ports these two of them are running off the Intel chipset and four of them are not. Now I have a concern about the fact that this board doesn't have any USB 2 ports because from time to time USB 3 drivers are not going to be automatically installed by your OS which means that if you're operating all of your peripherals based on the back panel ports and you haven't installed the driver for those ports yet your keyboard and mouse might not work. So I would definitely recommend if you have one of these boards and you're having trouble with it just use one of your front headers plug into your front USB 2 in order to get up and running and then install all your drivers and then these should all work just fine. We've also got VGA DVI HDMI and DisplayPort out options remember with Ivy Bridge you can support up to three displays out at a time even on onboard graphics. Optical audio out dual eSATA gigabit ethernet as well as 7.1 analog audio out. Round out the IO options on this board nice little touches matte black PCB using proper screws to attach all of the coolers on this board in spite of the fact that it is a UD3 level board so this is not a premium level board. Another nice touch is the fact that they have included SLI support even though this is a more value segmented board as well as oh yeah there's the front USB 3 which I don't think I ever showed you. So finally last but not least we have one two three four five well that's actually not bad. Five 4 pin PWM fan headers and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.