 This video is brought to you by Cooler Master, featuring the Sidon 240mm all-in-one CPU water cooling system. Check it out at www.coolermaster-usa.com Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Gigabyte Z77X UP7. So their tagline for this guy is, A new legend is born, and I believe that has something to do with the fact that this board is now the host of, well, at least when they printed the box, these things change all the time, but is now the host of the world record 7.102 GHz overclock on a 3770K. So there you go, they've got a little badge on their box to tell you all about how the overclocking features of this board are not one of those all-show and no-go type affairs, but actually delivering results in the competitive overclocking scene. So we're going to go ahead and we see the board first, but I'm going to make you guys sit through the accessories before we actually check it out. Lots of accessories, there are many, many accessories. So accessory number one is their PCI Express Bluetooth and Wi-Fi card. Go ahead and give you guys a look at this. What's cool about this is you actually don't have to use it on Gigabyte boards, you can use it on a different board should you so desire, so you can carry that with you as your system evolves and changes over potentially the years. Okay, so there's the antennas that go with them, they're just little standalone antennas, you stick them wherever you want. Next up, we've got all of the connectivity. This board does support four-way SLI, so it comes with a four-way SLI bridge, a three-way SLI bridge, a two-way flexible crossfire bridge, and presumably, there we go, a two-way flexible SLI bridge. All of these are black, which means they will actually go with your computer color scheme, whereas I've seen sort of brutal ones in the past that don't match the board that you actually bought it with. We've also got lead-outs for the voltage monitoring that is built into the board, you don't have to solder anything, as well as a USB cable that is, I believe, for the Wi-Fi Bluetooth card. It comes with a three and a half inch front USB 3 bay, so if your case doesn't have USB 3 natively, you can add it, no problem. It also comes with one of Gigabyte's awesome eSATA brackets, so that goes in a PCI bracket and includes a Molex power connector, and then they also include a Molex to dual SATA, internal SATA adapter, so you can just plug in two external drives easily just to the back of your system without any extra adapters or enclosures or anything like that. You just plug them in and go. Finally, we've got six SATA 3, six gigabit per second cables, three right angle and three straight, an I.O. shield, there you go, color-coded for your convenience, and all the manuals and whatnot that you will need. Now, let's get into the board itself. So Gigabyte really is throwing everything at this board in terms of technology, whether it's performance-related, cooling-related, or even looks-related, it looks really, really sharp, just like many of their other OC boards. And give me a moment to get this adjusted so I can actually show you guys what it looks like. This is not an XL ATX board, which I personally like to see. I want to see that functionality put into a form factor that most cases can actually accept, but they've still managed to make it four-way SLI and four-way Crossfire compatible. Now, the problem with Z77 boards that are able to run four-way configurations is that usually they use bridge chips, that while they increase the bandwidth available to the slots, it can have a negative impact on latency. So if you're going to run a single graphics card configuration, what you would want to do is use this black port right here. Very innovative, very cool approach from Gigabyte. This black port goes natively directly to the CPU, PCIe 16x, and will have no additional latency involved, so you only have to use these orange ports if you're running dual graphics. Awesome, love to see it. Cooling-wise, they've changed up the approach a little bit. We've seen a lot of cooling solutions implemented on motherboards that are more for show rather than for the actual thermal dissipation. Remember, it's all about surface area. So the cooler on here uses a very thin, dense heat sink arrangement in order to dissipate more heat to the surrounding air and not necessarily just be for looks. So there's one for the south bridge area, one for the north bridge area, and then one around the 32-phase power design. So that is part of what allows the CPU to get such stable power. However, just throwing more power phases at a board is not necessarily going to improve the performance in any meaningful way. You actually have to build good phases. So Gigabyte is using the same IOR, truly all-digital PWM, so there's nothing analog left in the power delivery system that is actually on the board that I'm using, the X79S UP5, which is an X79 board, whereas this is a Z77, so a different socket. Otherwise, I'd probably consider using something like this, and that is how you're able to push the clocks up on those CPUs, even under extreme conditions such as extremely low temperature, which is required for boosting things up to that level anyway. So in terms of the actual connectors on the board, we've got two 8-pin CPU connectors up here at the top left in their ideal locations, one 24-pin connector over here on the far right in its ideal location, front USB 3 is on the right-hand edge of the board as well as the bottom, so depending which approach you prefer, you can definitely go ahead and leverage either of those. It includes an MSATA port, so port 5 over here will be disabled if you use it. Personally, for a desktop system, I'd usually just add an SSD or a drive rather than using MSATA, but there you go, you have the option. Auxiliary power is provided by a SATA connector here. I do recommend using this if you're going to install three graphics cards or more. We've got six SATA 3 6-gigabit-per-second ports. These two are powered by Intel. These two are powered by a Marvell chipset, and then four SATA 2 3-gigabit-per-second ports. There's the debug LED as well as controls for the main BIOS as well as the secondary BIOS, so it does have a dual BIOS system with hardware switches allowing you to decide which one you want to boot from. Your front panel connectors are here. This red USB port supports on-off, which is cool because your devices will charge whether it's a phone or a tablet, even if your computer is powered off, and your front panel audio is right over here. The board support includes support for the latest Core i3, i5, and i7 processors on the LGA 1155 platform. So there are seven onboard fan headers. One, two PWM up here at the top, a third PWM here on the right-hand side, a fourth, fifth, and fifth PWM down here on the bottom, and then two three-pin connectors down here on the bottom. So that means you can control all these fans through the BIOS rather than using a third-party controller or whatever else. I mean, this is the stuff that I glazed over because it seems basic now, but LGA 1155 does support up to four DIMMs of dual-channel DDR3 memory with up to eight gig DIMMs, so you can put in a total of 32 gigs of RAM should you so desire. This board does feature the latest ultra-durable technology, meaning the 2X copper PCB as well as their new fiberglass, or glass fabric rather, not fiberglass, glass fabric PCB, which is humidity resistant, so it's going to be great for damp environments where there's lots of humidity in the air, as well as other regular environments. Little nice touches like this I like to see, so they've got more cooling on the back of the board for the MOSFETs, and that will help particularly with chassis such as the ENTEC 1100, where there's actually space on the back where some airflow can come through, as well as using screws for all the built-in heat sinks. It means they're not likely to come loose and travel, or if the board undergoes any kind of a flex, they'll stay on and the board will actually function as intended. So I think that pretty much wraps it up. I mean, there's other weird stuff that I can't say. You guys can tune out if you're not interested in the crazy stuff. So here's where all the voltage checkpoints are. So if you're doing any kind of crazy overvolting, that's where you can measure them directly with a multimeter rather than relying on software. Here's where you can switch to liquid nitrogen mode. Clear CMOS switches up here, power, as well as overclocking buttons. So these are for directly overclocking the board. They have a hardware interface with the board, so you don't have to worry about any software. And then this gear button actually changes the increments that these buttons use to overclock the board itself. The reset switch is away from all the other switches for whatever reason. It's down here in the bottom right corner. I guess that's for ease of access when it's on a bench, since reset is the one that you're typically using a lot in that scenario. And of course, the rear I.O., which I completely forgot, it's actually been a long time since I've done a motherboard unboxing. We haven't had a new platform in quite a while. AM3 Plus and LGA1155 have been with us forever. Six USB 3.0 ports, PS2, VGA, DVI, display port, HDMI, optical audio out, two gigabit ethernet and 7.1 audio out. Thank you for watching this Linus Tech Tips unboxing, and don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this from me.