 Welcome to my unboxing of Gigabytes, at this time, highest end motherboard for the X79 platform. This is the UD7. This is sort of part of their OC series, so in terms of color scheme, in terms of robustness, this is more of a continuation of the X58 OC than the X58 UD7 series boards. It uses their new 3D BIOS, which shows you an image of the board and you click on the various parts of the board in order to configure things that are to do with those. It has 3D power, which is not three dimensional, but rather three-way digital power, so that is separate power delivery systems for the CPU as well as the two different memory zones. It supports the latest Intel Core i7 and Core i7 Extreme processors on the X79 socket 20 LGA 2011 platform. It supports PCI Express Gen 3 asterisk, asterisk depends on the bubble block expansion and CPU. Basically it will in the future. 4-channel DDR3 is supported and it comes with a little Bluetooth 4.0 and WiFi module included, which also happens to work on other motherboards. If you buy this board and you happen to have another system that needs WiFi, you can throw it in there. They haven't locked you out the way that some of their competitors do with those little add-on cards, so thumbs up Gigabyte. Thank you for that. Adding more value. All right. Go see dual BIOS. You can use the BIOS selector button on the back panel in order to pick which BIOS you want to use at any given time. OCPEG provides two additional onboard SATA power connectors that provide more stable PCIe power in three-way and four-way configurations and also prevent connector burn on the 24 pin. I'm a big fan of using SATA power connectors for those because most modern power supplies have a ton of those and not too many Molex connectors, especially in modular setup where you basically be plugging in like a four connector Molex power plug just to plug into that one thing. So that's awesome. Okay. We have as many onboard buttons as I've pretty much seen so far. So you can onboard adjust the base clock, which I generally wouldn't recommend doing, onboard adjust the CPU multiplier as well as change gear. So you can either adjust in 0.1 megahertz steps or 1 megahertz steps depending on the gear you're in. You also got your onboard power and your onboard reset switch. Let's go ahead and get this baby opened up. You guys are going to discover that contrary to what I thought, and what I thought was that the Gigabyte G1 Assassin 2 was going to be the highest end Gigabyte motherboard on the X79 platform. You are going to find out that it is rather the UD7 that is the highest end Gigabyte motherboard on the X79 platform. So there's the board itself. Looks bouse. If I may say so. And here are all the included accessories, which are many. So we have a front panel USB 3, 3.5 inch. We have, ooh nice, we've got one of those handy dandy, they used to include these with a lot of their boards. Now it looks like only on the very high end. So this is awesome. You got two eSATAs, you got one mole X power, and then it comes with an adapter from one mole X to two SATA power. So you can just throw bare drives on there. And these are like the most handy cables in the world. These are eSATA to SATA. So this is a way to easily plug a couple bare drives into the back of your system and transfer data or do whatever else you need to do. Very very handy. It doesn't sound that useful, but it really really is. Okay, we've got a USB cable to power up and transfer data to this guy right here. So this is our PCIe 1X Bluetooth and wireless end adapter, which also includes a couple of antennas right about there. We've got a gigabyte three-way SLI bridge, a gigabyte four-way SLI bridge, oh which is finally black. Check that out. Black gigabyte SLI bridges. Love it. Love it. We have a gigabyte two-way SLI bridge. Nice flexible connector there. And then finally we have a gigabyte long crossfire bridge as well as an IO shield. Lots of accessories. Look at this. Color-coded for your satisfaction and happiness. As well as a gigabyte sticker, a gigabyte manual, and another gigabyte, oh, Dolby sticker. And finally a utility DVD and wireless card driver CD or DVD, which you don't need because you can download the latest off the gigabyte website. So I'm going to go ahead and put these back in here. I'm going to put that back in there. I'm going to put this back in here. I'm going to take this out of here. I'm going to unbox this here. I'm going to see it. Look at that. Hot glue trail. Fascinating. I wonder what they glued to the motherboard. Maybe it was slick. No, he says no. I think he's probably just trolling me. I'm going to put random stuff on whatever Linus is going to unbox just to throw him off the scent. Okay, here we go. What do we got? Let's start with the overall layout of this board. So this is an XL, that is to say extra large ATX motherboard. It has seven expansion slots, which is something that is very, very difficult to do on a regular ATX X79 board for a couple of reasons. One is the extremely large CPU socket. The other is the extremely large and robust power delivery systems that typically exist on these boards due to the power hungry CPUs that go in them. And the other is the fact that the memory now goes on either side of the socket as per the Intel recommended design, which gives you less room for slots up here and more room for needing to put slots down here. So let's start with this socket right here. We've got a pretty beefy looking power delivery system with a pretty decent looking cooler. Although the same feedback that I gave with all my other X79 board unboxings remains for this one. You are going to want to make sure you get some decent cooling on the PWM heatsink right here. So if you have a case that, for example, has a top fan, you're going to want to have it blow directly down onto this heatsink so that it's bringing in nice fresh air. To keep that cool, keep it from running into any trouble. The same thing goes for the back of the board. So your standoffs are going to go right here and you'll have a little bit of a gap. So if you do have a top fan in your case and you get a little bit of airflow over these guys, it could not hurt matters. Okay? So we've got dual 8-pin CPU power connectors right here in their ideal location at the top left. We've got all of our onboard switches in their ideal locations up here at the top right. I say ideal location because rather than having them down here where they're inaccessible with a graphics card plugged in here, I prefer to have them up in this corner where I can actually reach them no matter what the situation. We also have a reset. Okay, so reset. So you know what? I covered all this when we did the box. We've also got all the V checkpoints that we could possibly want along this edge of the board right here. So I'll let you guys have a look. If you care, you can pause the video and you can see them all. I'm not going to read them all out. On the right-hand edge, we've got the 24-pin power connector in its ideal location. We have a post-LED readout. We've also got our auxiliary power connector. So there's the one SATA power connector there. There's the other SATA power connector right down there. And in terms of SATA data connectors, we have SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second right here, two SATA 4, SATA 2, 3 gigabit per second, and then four additional gigabyte SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second. So those are running off of a third-party chipset. The cooler right here is pretty sporty-looking, I'd say. So it has a heat pipe that runs up to that PWM cooler. The whole thing looks pretty slick. Personally, I'm a big fan of green and orange and yellow and like brightly colored, but tastefully brightly colored motherboards. So not like the gigabyte of old. We're talking the new gigabyte with the matte black PCB, the bright orange, and then everything else pretty much black or matte black or gray. Looks great. Front panel connectors, powered USB, so like uber-powered USB for charging your tablet with your system. We've also got two more USB 2.0 front panel headers or front panel audio connector header dealy. Then what else we got here? So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Right, I already covered that. These support SLI or Crossfire in a two-way configuration right about here. Okay, 16x, 16x. If you want to run four-way cards, you're looking at 1, 2, 3, 4 times 8x. So this is 8x PCIe2 or PCIe 3.0 CPU support dependent. Okay, we've got three PCIe1x connectors. So if you plug in two dual-slot graphics cards, you're going to be left with an 8x, an 8x, and a 1x. Bearing in mind, if you populate these, it will reduce the bandwidth available in these. Okay, moving on. You know what? I'm going to do a few more communications of all of our fan headers because it looks like we got a lot on this board. We got one 4-pin PWM here, one 4-pin PWM here, one here. That's three so far. We have two more here. That's five so far. Six, seven, ah, ah, ah, seven PWM connectors. All right, on the back of the board, we have a variety of different things. We have the PS2 keyboard mouse combo port that I'm a big fan of, still seeing on boards. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight USB 2.0 ports. The CMOS selector, or rather the BIOS chip selector button, so you can choose which BIOS chip you want to boot from. Clear CMOS button, OC button, that is one touch overclocking. So we've tried this with the 3630, is that what it's called? 3930 something. Hold on, I'll be back in a moment. Sorry, 3930, and we hit four gigahertz just by pressing the button, and it was stable. USB 3.0 times two, gigabit ethernet, and 7.1 audio out, including an optical audio out. And I think that pretty much covers it. I have sort of changed my mind, actually. I wanted to hold it up to it and sort of visualize a little bit. But I was going to use the Assassin 2 to update our Extreme Buyers Guide system with the X79 platform, but based on that, I think that looks pretty good, the green and the orange. Based on that I like this, I think we're actually going to go with the X79UD7 instead. Now one thing that's been kind of bugging me is I think this XL ATX motherboard is actually not quite as long as the Assassin 2. This looks like only eight PCI slots rather than nine. Remember guys, XL ATX is kind of a flexible standard in that some XL ATX boards are eight slots long, like this one, and some of them are nine. So what that means is that you can install this in a much wider variety of cases than the Assassin 2 was capable of being installed in. So many Lee and Lee cases, yeah, that's awesome actually. Good job Gigabyte. So thanks for checking out my unboxing of the X79UD7. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.