 Okay, so today I'm going to be having a look at the grandpapa of all of the Gigabyte X58 motherboards. This is the brand new X58A UD7. Now it was originally going to be called the X58 Extreme 2, sorry not UD anything, Extreme 2 when they were first talking about this product, but since then they've actually changed the naming scheme a little bit, they've done away with the Xtreme boards, and they've gone with an A. Now A denotes their new updated X58 and P55 boards, and the biggest features that you're going to see on these boards are their 333 onboard accelerator. So that stands for USB 3.0. So that's a brand new USB standard that runs at 5 gigabit per second. Sorry, excuse me, megabit. Okay, there's USB power times 3. Now what that means is that your USB ports on this board are all running at 3 times the power spec that USB actually calls for. So that means that if you're running a hub, like an unpowered hub, you can actually run three full-powered devices off that hub using just one of these ports because of the way Gigabyte has overbuilt those ports. Very cool. And we've also got SATA 3.0, which technically isn't SATA 3.0, it's SATA 6 gigabit per second rather than SATA 3 gigabit per second, so there's a little bit of confusion there, but you get the point. Also a three-year warranty, it's SLI ready, Crossfire ready, it's ready for pretty much everything so this board comes with everything except the kitchen sink. In fact you could even argue the water cooling integrated on it could be sort of like a kitchen sink. So it comes with 3 8-inch barbs for water cooling, there's a whole bunch of marketing spiel in there. 24 phase power, that's another improvement they've made over the X58 Extreme, which was definitely an awesome X58 board. I actually had one I used for quite a while before I replaced it for aesthetic reasons because although Gigabyte makes awesome boards, sometimes the look is not always what you're going for in a particular build. Okay so let's get this board open here, it comes in like a nice white box and then you can see that our... okay first we have a plastic shell. So plastic shell comes off. Okay plastic shell off. And then we have, you know what, let's do the accessories first. Okay accessory box. So inside the accessory box I have an eSATA back panel, I have Molex to eSATA adapter and I have a couple eSATA cables. Okay that's kind of neat. Okay and then next I have four SATA cables and an IDE cable. Okay next I have a Dolby Digital home theater sticker. Awesome. Next I have a three-way SLI bridge just in case you want to run a three-way SLI on this board. I.O. shield. This I don't know what it is but it has holes for ventilation and it seems to be some kind of brace. So yeah. Then we have a regular SLI bridge. Now remember this is a Crossfire ready board and it doesn't come with a Crossfire bridge because Crossfire ready video cards it should come with the Crossfire bridge. Okay then we've got a little Gigabyte sticker. Gigabyte manual including the driver CD. Don't use the driver CD, download the latest drivers off the manufacturer website. Multilingual installation guidebook. Awesome. And then you have their Smart 6 users manual. Okay next thing we've got is the heat sink that goes at the... You know what I'm not even going to take this thing out. You basically shouldn't be using this thing. It's like totally overkill but I guess if you're buying the Extreme board you might as well. So it's a heat pipe cooler that actually straps onto the board right here and then mounts into a PCI slot so you can use all of this huge thin array for cooling the the chipset and the MOSFETs and the chips down here. So now let's get to the board itself. So wow that's a heavy board. As with all X58 boards you have support for triple channel memory. So this particular board supports up to 24 gigs of triple channel memory. You can see all around here is all of our 24 phases of power for your LGA 1366 socket. Now this is a Lotz socket which seems to matter these days because there was an issue with some of the Foxconn sockets a little while back. Alright so we've got our power connectors in their usual places. 8 pin up here, 24 pin down here. Now this is where it starts to get interesting. Here on the side we have six SATA 2 ports so SATA 3 gigabit per second and four SATA 6 gigabit per second or SATA 3 ports. Now the original Extreme board was supposed to include these but they ended up having to sub it for something else because the standard wasn't quite ready but now here they are in all of their glory. And here we go where's more stuff. Okay yeah we've got our three PCI Express 16x slots. You know these are the right ones because these are the ones that are spaced for tri-SLI. Okay so that means you still got access to a couple PCI Express 1x slots up here at the top. Now over here is the back panel. Now the blue ones those are your USB 3.0 ports as far as I know. The yellow ones are just color-coded for no particular reason. You got 7.1 audio, 2 gigabit ethernet so 6 USB 2.0, 2 USB 3.0, a couple Firewire ports, clear CMOS button. That is so handy. Then you've got a couple of digital audio and a couple PS2 ports. There's the back of the board nothing exceptional there. I love to see metal braces for anything from the front of the board because it means that they're not cheaping out using plastic. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the X58A UD7.