 Today I will be unboxing the 990 FX8 UD7. This is a truly high end 990 FX board from Gigabyte. Features a bucket load of features including unlocked performance. That is to say it is compatible with the upcoming unlocked FX chips from AMD. It features full support for AMD Crossfire X, Nvidia SLI, and Rocket give it a rest. So I guess he just needed attention isn't that right Rocket? Are you done bothering us now? Okay here you go. There you go sweetheart. Off he goes. Alright so yes AMD Crossfire X, Nvidia SLI, 333 onboard acceleration that is USB 3.0, SATA 3, and 3x USB power for additional power through USB hubs or charging higher powered devices, ultra durable 3, 3 year warranty, and 8 plus 2 phase power. Okay moving along to the inside we see a window through to the motherboard. We see some glamour shots of the motherboard itself. We see it features driver MOSFETs and what else we got over here. So we've got support for 4 way SLI and 4 way Crossfire. Now there's a cool feature, dual BIOS which means if you corrupt your BIOS during flashing you can restore it using another physical BIOS chip and hybrid EFI technology giving you support for 3 terabyte plus hard drives. We have a debug LED for diagnosing boot problems as well as a couple of other things here including on off charging for your USB devices with one of the front USB headers. On the back we see pretty much the same stuff that we were looking at on the inside. So let's go ahead and open this bad boy up. Alright now we see the window is, huh that's kind of funny, the window is small here but it's full size here. Someone who was designing the inner carton of the packaging was not talking to the guy who was designing the outer carton of the packaging who thinks. I could be wrong though, it's happened before. Alright let's have a look at what we've got in terms of accessories. We have a gigabyte 3 way SLI bridge which is black, very nice. I hate seeing a black PCB, gorgeous looking motherboard coming with a blue 3 way SLI bridge. Alright we have 2 right angle and 2 straight, say the 3 cables. We have a Crossfire bridge, a 4 way, oh a black, very nice, black 4 way SLI bridge and another Crossfire bridge. Okay so we have, oh yeah there it is, there's a 2 way SLI bridge. All of these are black, all of them are very very nice looking. That's very good to see, I hate mismatched 3 way and 4 way SLI bridges because you go and build a high end system and then you put an eyesore on it and that doesn't happen very often. Color coded rear I.O. shield. We have a user's manual with driver DVD, throw that away, download the latest from the gigabyte website, multilingual installation guidebook, a gigabyte sticker and a Dolby digital home theater sticker. Go ahead and close that up and have a look at the motherboard itself. So the last UD7 board from Gigabyte was an XL ATX form factor and it looks like they have actually gotten away from that with this iteration which I think is probably a move for in the right direction. So let's have a look at the, you know what, I'll do my usual thing and then I'll go back and look at some of the things that are special about this board. So here's our socket AM3 plus which supports all of your standard AM2, AM3, AM3 plus CPU heatsinks as long as it supports the wattage being output by the CPU then you should be fine and this is interesting. These are labeled coupon, coupon 1, 2, 3 and 4. Those look like voltage readouts but fascinating. So if anyone knows what the coupon, those four coupon things are, let me know. I think maybe they mean CPU. I got nothing. Okay guys, the 8 pin power connectors and it's top is in its ideal location in the top left of the board. We've got our very nice heat pipe connected chipset and MOSFET cooling solution going on here. So top chipsets here, bottom chipsets here. We used to call them Northbridge, Southbridge. Now they're not. And then the MOSFETs are here. Moving along to the right hand edge of the board, we find our 24 pin connector in its ideal location. We find power reset and clear CMOS buttons in a way better than usual location for onboard connectors. Down here is all fine and good until you install a PCI Express graphics card near the bottom of the board and then you can't reach it anymore. So this is very smart. Gigabyte has said, oh we're going to design a board that's going to have up to four graphics cards in it. Let's make it so you can actually put four graphics cards in it and still access the features. Good on you Gigabyte. All right, we've got auxiliary power for our graphics cards here so you can plug an additional SATA connector. Love seeing this as a SATA connector rather than a PCIe or a Molex connector because you're bound to have more extra SATA connectors than PCIe connectors if you go and install four graphics cards. Am I right? Okay, we've got gigabits, gigabyte SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports here. So those are running off a third party controller. Then we have SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports here. Oh, oh, oh, okay, right. So we've got eight total SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports. These six are running off the AMD chipset. These two are running off a gigabyte third party chipset. Here is our debug LED. Here are our front panel connectors. Here is our front USB 3.0, front USB 2.0. That's the extra power one. You can tell from the red background. Two front USB 2.0, front Firewire and front panel audio headers are available. In terms of our PCIe layout, we've got a very advanced looking PCIe layout here. So here is a 16x slot. Here's another 16x slot. So if you're installing two cards, those are your guys right there. Those are the ones you want to use. We've got a 4x slot. This is pretty much not intended to be used because it's right next to your primary PCIe 16x slot. We have another 4x slot here and we have a PCI slot. So if you're installing two 16x cards, they will run at full 16x, 16x and you will be left with an 8x, a 4x and an 8x for expansion. If you're installing three PCI Express graphics cards, you will use this one, this one and this one. And you will be left with a single PCIe 8x slot for expansion and these will run at 8x, 8x, 8x in all likelihood although it might be 16, 8 and 8. If you are running four graphics cards, you will use this one, this one, this one and this one. They will run at 8x, 8x, 8x, 8x. So you will still get pretty much full performance out of all four graphics cards and you better watch out because you're going to want to make sure your case has additional room to hang over that second slot on the bottom graphics card such as if you have a Corsair 800D, then you're in good shape because even though it's a 7 PCI slot case, it does have an overhang and it does have a ventilation slot under that last expansion card. Okay, the overall layout of the board looks very, very nice. Let's show you guys where the fan headers are. So we've got our 4-pin CPU fan header here, we've got a 3-pin here, we've got a 4-pin here, we have a 3-pin here and that's about it. Actually not too many fan headers on this guy. Alright, having a look at the back, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 USB 2.0 ports. This one is one of those combo USB 2 eSATA ports. We have another USB, wow, what is this thing? No, that must be eSATA. Okay, so we've got another eSATA port, PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, optical and coaxial digital audio out, firewire, 2 USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet and 7.1 audio. So this is pretty much the cream of the cream for AMD boards. You can install anything from a 4-way 6970 graphics card from configuration with 16 gigs of RAM and a high-end 6-core or even 8-core once they're released. CPU, you can install a bunch of SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second SSDs. This will accept pretty much anything you throw at it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the 990FXA UD7 from Gigabyte and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos. Sorry guys, one thing I neglected to mention is this is slightly wider than ATX. It's not EATX, which would be about here, but you can see that past these three mounting holes there is a little bit of extra PCB on the edge here, so you should make sure that your case does support slightly wider than ATX specification.