 Apparently in this video we're going to be comparing the cameraman's car to my car. I think the cameraman wins, but that's neither here nor there. Actually what we're going to be talking about is the Gigabyte X58A UD9. This is a very exciting board which I've received endless requests to unbox and have a look at it. So let's start with the front of the box. Unlocked power with electricity and lightning bolts all over the place. For some reason the cameraman wants me to hold this. Maybe he wants me to hold it next to the iPhone that's here. On-off charge. That's another really cool feature that we've seen on some of Gigabyte's newest boards. On-off charge allows you to charge things via the USB ports whether your computer is on or off. Hence the name, on-off charge. Including iPhones, iPods, whatever else charges by USB. Let's have a look. What else do we got here? It delivers maximum CPU power with 24-phase CPU power built into this board. We have support for 4-way Crossfire X, 4-way SLI. It has a 3-year warranty in the US and Canada. Supports Intel's Extreme Edition 6-core CPUs as well as having their 333 onboard acceleration, USB 3.0. 3x USB power. So that means if you're using a hub, you can power 3x as many devices without plugging in an additional power adapter. As well as UltraDurable 3, SATA 3, and any other number. 3-year warranty. I don't know. There's got to be three of something else. Supports i7, i7 Extreme, and it's X58. That's three more things. God, I don't know where I was going with that. Let's take this piece of cardboard off and have a look at the board. So this is all basically the same stuff that we saw on the front. It has Smart Dual LAN. So you've got LAN port automatic switching between the two physical gigabit LAN chips. Offering hassle-free zero downtime, high-speed network connectivity, hybrid silent pipe too. So that means you can either hook up water cooling or you can hook up this huge air cooling heatsink to your board, depending on which route you want to go. More unlocked power. Okay. And then let's go around and have a look at the back of the box, which is exactly the same stuff again. Okay, why don't we just open it up and have a look at this sweet board then, and we'll stop looking at the box. Although it is a fairly nice box. I'll definitely give Gigabyte that. It's a very snazzy looking box. It's very shiny. See, I don't know if you can see this in the sun, but you see how shiny it is? Can you see those reflective little dots? Oh, that's not what I want you to look at. Okay, let's open up the board. The further I do. Oh, I hit the camera. Alright, so the first thing we're going to find inside here is... Oh, that was just a teaser. The first thing we're going to look at is the accessories. So in terms of accessories, we should find a fairly fully loaded package here. We have a three-way SLI bridge. We have a four-way SLI bridge because both of those configurations are supported. We have the user's manual as well as the driver DVD. Don't use this. Download the latest off the Gigabyte website. We have... Oh, hold on, hold on. Congratulations on your... Oh, neat. Okay, we have a Gigabyte VIP card. Okay, what do you get? Register today for a chance to win an Apple iPad. Cool. Okay. We have a Gigabyte sticker. Some extra motherboard standoffs, and I'll explain why we need those in a minute. We have a Smart Six user's manual as well as a multilingual installation guidebook. Then on the other side, we have some SATA 6 Gigabit per second cables. Four of them to be precise. Oh, wow. Yeah, four. Okay, and then we have an IDE cable. We have two long crossfire bridges. We have an eSATA bracket. So this includes power, two eSATA ports, and that all plugs in internally, and then a couple of Molex or one Molex to two SATA power adapter. So that means you can just plug in bare drives. It's very convenient for storage as well as two eSATA to SATA cables. We have an I.O. shield and a third crossfire bridge. No, that's an SLI... Oh, okay. That's a straight SLI bridge. These are two crossfire bridges, and then we have three-way and four-way SLI bridges. That pretty much takes care of the entire accessory package for this particular board. Go ahead and put all that back in there. Do that. And now we will have a look, finally, at the board itself. No, I'm lying again. Okay, we're going to have a look at the Xtreme cooler that you can actually put on top of the hybrid silent pipe that you can put on top of it. This is the same one that we've seen included ever since the X58 Xtreme. Oh, there's a sticker that fell off here. Okay, it supports an extra 8-pin CPU connector. So the first thing that you should notice about this board, if you're a very observant viewer, is that it is not a standard ATX board. So right here, you can see a gap between where normally you'd have the first slot and where the first slot actually is on this board. Okay, I'm just going to grab a board. My ghetto ancient motherboard that I use to compare size every once in a while. So we're going to just put that over top of the Gigabyte UD9, and you can see it's quite a bit longer on the bottom and also quite a bit wider. So this is sort of an XL ATX, EATX, sort of hybrid form factor board. And yeah, so that's the first thing that you'll notice. You'll also notice it has seven PCI Express 16x slots, although they're not all electrical 16x. So this one, this one, this one, and this one are all actually wired for 16x, while this one, this one, and this one are only wired for 8x. Next we have, yeah, that's pretty cool. So that's the cooler that is going to be cooling the Selfbridge as well as the NF200 chips that power this particular board. That's the way that Gigabyte was able to achieve so many PCI Express slots. You can actually populate every single slot. I believe they'll all run at 8x, and I don't recall whether it's using one NF200 chip or two NF200 chips. So if you know the answer to that, please post it in the comments under the video, and I would be eternally grateful. So why don't we start at the CPU socket. I'll start over again. This is an LGA1366 socket. It's fairly bog standard as far as that goes. It is a Lote socket, so you don't have to worry about any problems with the CPU contacting the pins correctly, if you are concerned about that sort of thing. To the left of the socket we have two 8-pin EPS connectors, so that means you can deliver a whole lot of power to that CPU through this motherboard. Although you only need to plug in one of them. You can see this little sticker here supports an extra CPU 8-pin power connector. Next we have six DDR3 module slots. They are running in triple channel, so the first ones you're going to populate are going to be the white ones. And then you'd populate the blue ones, it supports up to 24 gigs of memory. Our 24-pin connectors in its ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board. And also along the right-hand edge of the board, and I love this, you've got your power and reset switches. This is where they belong, not at the bottom of the board, because whether you're on a test bench or whether you're in a case, it's hard to get at switches that are down at the very bottom right of the board. This is always easy to access because it's next to your RAM, where there won't be a video card or a CPU heat sink overhanging it. Perfect, thank you Gigabyte, good work. Next we have, yes, four SATA3 6 gigabit per second ports. So the white ones are color-coded for SATA 6 gigabit per second. We have an IDE port in between them, and then we have six SATA2 3 gigabit per second ports running off of the Intel Southbridge. We have an LED diagnostic display right here. We have our front panel connectors, front USB, front USB, front USB, front firewire, a floppy connector just in case you still have a floppy drive. And then we have two additional Molex connectors, so one here at the very bottom left, and then one up above the PCI Express slots. And those are going to be to provide auxiliary power to a super beefy graphics card configuration that you might want to plug into a board like this. So let's have a bit of a closer look at the cooling solution. I know we looked at the Southbridge cooling before. I'm not talking about that chip camera man. Okay, we had a closer look at the Southbridge solution before. So that's here, that's just a big block of metal basically. And then we're going to be relying on, because there isn't actually a whole lot of cooling potential here. So if you're water cooling this board, only the CPU, I'd be a little bit concerned because there's a whole lot of stuff here to cool. You've got your SATA 6 chipset down here, you've got your Southbridge, you've got your Northbridge, you've got an NF200 or two. Don't forget to write a comment if you know. You've got your MOSFETs, and that's a whole lot of stuff. And you've only got these heat sinks right here, and that's pretty much it. I mean, this doesn't really have any air cooling potential to it. It's got like a little tiny heat sink in there, but that's not getting any air flow. And then this is just a big block of metal. So you either need to connect the hybrid silent pipe, or you need to connect water cooling to the Northbridge block right here. And that's what's going to take care of cooling all of this stuff, because it is all connected via heat pipes. So as long as you cool this spot right here, you make sure you take care of your MOSFETs as well as all of your chipsets on a board like this. Front audio connector is here, and let's have a look at the back connectivity on this motherboard. So first of all, we've got two PS2 ports. Personally, I think that's necessary. I like PS2 ports. They're useful. Yeah, it's legacy, but I don't think it's that big of a deal. Next, we've got... camera man wants it at this angle for some reason. Alright, next we've got digital audio out, so we have optical as well as coaxial. We have a clear SIMO switch in its absolutely idealist possible location on the back panel. You can always reach that no matter what is installed on the board. We have two Firewire ports, we have two USB 2.0 ports, two USB 2.0 eSATA combo ports. Let me just double check that that is indeed what those are. Yes, it is. We have two more USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two gigabit LAN, as well as 7.1 audio out. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Gigabyte X58A-UD9. And just for scale, I'm going to take the cameraman's iPhone again and show you just how huge this board is. Yeah, that's right. The self-bridge heatsink is like the size of an iPhone.