 Welcome to my unboxing of the 990X8 UD3. This is a 2011 performance motherboard, which is a very strange way to brand it given that the bulldozer CPUs are fully supported by this particular board. So it'll perform just fine in 2012 as well. So yeah, okay, moving on. Power performance means we have full support for AM3 Plus unlocked FX processors from AMD. This is a 9 series chipset. So that means we do have support for Crossfire. All 50,000 hour Japanese solid caps with 3x USB power, USB 3 and SATA 3. That is the 333 onboard acceleration. We also have support for 3 terabyte plus hard drives with the dual BIOS hybrid EFI technology. Dual BIOS also means that if your BIOS is corrupted during a flash, you can reflash it using the other physical BIOS chip located on the board. We have 8 plus 2 phase power, ultra durable 3 classic and a 3 year warranty in the US and Canada. So that's more like 333333. All right, on the back, we see not a whole lot that we didn't already find out on the front. So let's go ahead and open her up. It does support the on off charge feature, which allows you to charge your iPhone even if the board is powered down. Very cool. All right, we have a utility DVD as well as a manual. Next we have an SLI bridge, black flexible bridge, my personal favorite. All right, we have a right angle and straight SATA cable times two. So two right angle and two straight SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables. We have a color coded IO shield. Very handy. And finally, we have a multilingual installation guide book. Oh, no, not finally. Wait, there's more. We have a gigabyte powered sticker as well as a Dolby home theater sticker. I'm not going to even try and get that out of there. All right, let's have a look at the motherboard itself. So this uses a pretty typical gigabyte AMD platform motherboard color scheme. So we have a blue PCB with white and powder blue. Whoops. There we go. Slots. There we are. So we have a black CPU socket. That means support for AM3 plus. We've also got the standard mounting brackets. So no matter whether you have an AM2, AM3 or AM3 plus CPU heatsink, it will fit. Very good stuff. There's our 8 plus 2 phase power design and our VRM heatsink. Our 8 pin power connector is located in its ideal location along the top left corner. And we have support for four DIMMs in dual channel off to the right here. They are color coded for easy dual channel operation. Our 24 pin connector is along the right hand edge of the board in its ideal location. And we have six SATA3 6 gigabit per second SATA ports running off of the AMD chipset. Very handy. Love to see that feature. Six SATA3. Remember, there is no Intel chipset currently that supports more than two SATA3 6 gigabit per second ports off the chipset itself. We have our front panel connectors, front panel USB. We have an extra power USB port. Remember, that is ideal for connecting and charging your iPad using the utility. We have two more front USB connectors, trusted platform module. We've got firewire and front audio connectors also here. Another thing to note is that we do have full support for Nvidia SLI as well as ATI Crossfire X. In spite of the fact that this is merely a 990X board rather than being a 990FX board, it has a great PCI slot layout. So let's go ahead and have a look. So we've got two PCI E1X, two PCI, one PCI E4X. This is physical 16X, but it's only wired up to 4X here. And then we have a 16X and an 8X slot here. So these guys are going to run in 8X, 8X mode for SLI. But please note that actually doesn't matter. Even on very high end graphics cards, you're not going to see a significant performance degradation from running them in 8X, 8X mode. If you install two dual slot cards, you're going to be left with one PCI, one PCI E1 and one PCI E4X slot for expansion. That's a great layout. It gives you all kinds of options. You can go, you know, Revo Drive, Soundcard and Legacy Card. No problem. All right. Moving on to the back of the board, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight USB 2.0 ports. Those are all high powered 3X power ports, meaning you can plug them into a hub and run several high powered devices off of them. We have PS2 keyboard and mouse combo port. We have optical audio out, Firewire, two USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet and 7.1 audio out. So I'd say this board is great for a value type configuration. Throw 8 to 16 gigs of RAM in there. Throw an SSD and a hard drive on there. It does have support for dual graphics cards, but because it is 16X or 8X, 8X, some people might not be comfortable installing two high end cards. So two value cards or one high end card is a great choice for this. And I'm very excited about the upcoming Bulldozer CPUs, which are fully supported by this board. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.