 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Z77X UD4H from Gigabyte. This is sort of a lowest that I would recommend motherboard because when you go any lower than this, you start to compromise features that matter and this is where you start to get into the features that I think matter the most without spending an exorbitant amount of money on things that most people won't use. So for example, you've got the support for all the latest Core i3, i5 and i7 processors. You've got their fully digital power design as well as their 3D dual UEFI BIOS which basically makes it almost impossible to brick one of their boards by flashing the BIOS or whatever else. You get Crossfire and SLI compatibility. It does support Virtue MVP which is basically the way that you can use the onboard graphics on your CPU in order to transcode video and use your dedicated graphics for gaming. PCIe Gen 3 is a given these days. Ultra durable 4 is pretty much all the old ultra durable stuff. In addition to the new glass fabric PCB that makes it humidity resistant. All digital power so CPU, graphics, memory and the Uncore as it used to be called. I have no idea what we call it now apparently VTT. And then they talk a little bit about load line calibration versus not load line calibration. Although it's very debatable. You know lots of people believe you should use it and shouldn't use it. Here's a closer look at what their PCB design looks like. Intel Smart Response allows you to use an SSD to cache your hard drive to make it go faster. Surprisingly few people use it but they should. It's awesome and their easy smart response utility is actually the easiest way to set up smart response. And it only works on gigabyte boards. I have used it before and it's awesome. Electrostatic protection is cool. So what it amounts to is for example many motherboard manufacturers will do one fuse for sort of a bunch of USB ports. Whereas gigabyte does one fuse per port. So if something gets zapped at least you're going to lose less of the functionality of your board. Included accessories are pretty bare bones. So you got four SATA cables. An SLI bridge. Remember crossfire bridges are included with your graphics card. A gigabyte sticker. Multilingual installation guidebook. A user's manual. A driver disk which you aren't going to use and you're going to download the latest off the manufacturer website. And of course a color coded I.O. shield. Look at all that. That USB 3 that be all over this board. Because it has not only the Intel USB 3 that comes with the Z77 chipset. But also third party USB 3. Gigabyte has done such a good job of cleaning up their color schemes over the last couple of generations. So I'm going to start in the place that I usually do which is the CPU socket. Got lots of room around there for large coolers as well as lots of cooling for your MOSFET. So it looks like one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven. So that's probably like an eight plus three phase power design or something along those lines. Either way it's using gate. I mean yeah. Quite frankly with an Ivy Bridge CPU as long as you've got a good quality board. Which is again why I sort of recommend starting at that UD4 range. You're not going to be limited in your overclocking endeavors by your CPU power delivery. Unless you're going sub zero or doing something exotic. This is ample for air and water cooling. We've got a single eight pin CPU connector up here which is all you need for an Ivy Bridge CPU. You've got a clear CMOS button as well as a reset switch and a power switch. Up here at the top right you've got four DDR3 slots supporting up to 32 gigs of DDR3 memory. Your 24 pin connector and its ideal slot along the right. And you've got an auxiliary SATA connector. This is kind of handy if you are installing multiple high powered graphics cards. So if you're going to throw a couple GTX 690s in here or something. I do recommend plugging in a SATA connector and it'll give a little bit more power to those graphics card slots and reduce the risk of burning out any of the pins on your 24 pin here. Front USB 3 is over here on the right. This is where I do like to see it although a right angle connector would be even better. And over here we've got SATA 3 off the Intel chipset. SATA 2 off the Intel chipset. So two of those and four of those and more SATA 3 off of a third party chipset. We've also got a front post indicator LED as well as the front panel connectors. And the BIOS switch which switches between BIOS 1 and BIOS 2 which are two physical chips on the board itself. Three USB 2.0 headers are down here on the bottom as well as the trusted platform module and front panel audio. No firewire on this board. That's starting to disappear even on fully featured boards like this one. And for our PCI Express slot loadout I think it's pretty solid actually. So if you have a single dual slot graphics card installed that's going to leave you with one two PCIe 1x, two PCIe 16x physical and a PCI. However bear in mind guys that this is 16x physical. If you populate both of these it's going to be 8x 8x. This is an 8x slot and this one is a 4x that runs off the chipset itself as opposed to off of the CPU. So I wouldn't recommend populating this with a graphics card. And this PCI slot will be covered by a dual graphics card solution but what that means is you're going to be left with one one and four left for a further expansion which if you're running a dual graphics card setup you probably have a pretty high end computer anyway. So I understand Gigabyte's rationale when they did that. In terms of fan connectors we got one two four pin three four pin four four pin five four pin ah ah ah ah ah which is pretty good and you have full support for configuring those within the BIOS. Matte black PCB which I've started to take for granted. I remember I used to rant and rave about how awesome it is but there are other little details that matter. Check out the way Gigabyte's using screws as opposed to plastic push pins to keep on all the cooling. That means that no matter what happens in transit your board will probably arrive in a working condition. And finally on the back check out all that USB 3.0. You've got six USB 3.0 ports DVI VGA HDMI and DisplayPort out PS2 keyboard mouse combo port is included. Optical audio out is included. Two eSATA ports Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio and check this out Gigabyte's also built in a dedicated USB keyboard and mouse ports here. This is to increase compatibility as well as sometimes what manufacturers do is they include ports that are optimized for a 1000 Hertz polling rate which gives you that extra little tiny edge in terms of responsiveness assuming your keyboard and mouse do support that feature. So high temperature protection on off charge so even if the computer is powered down you can charge devices using USB and all Japanese solid caps which we've again started to take for granted at this point. And oh right don't forget Gigabyte's 3x power for their USB ports meaning that you can charge devices faster and you can run more devices. I'm pointing at the SATA ports you can run more devices off their USB ports without using a powered hub just passively. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thank you for checking out this one on the Z77X UD4H.