 Welcome to my unboxing of the Z68 XP UD3P from Gigabyte. This is a very value-oriented motherboard in terms of the price, but a very performance and looks and just generally awesome-oriented motherboard when you have a look at the features that are included, which are all of the Z68 features, and let's go through them. So the first one is Easy Smart Response, which is a Gigabyte exclusive, patent-pending, asterisk, asterisk, C, LTD, whatever the case may be. Basically what that means is it is a really easy way to use Intel SRT or Smart Response technology which allows you to take a large affordable hard drive and cache it, improve the performance of it with a small affordable SSD. It works really well. Everyone who can't afford an SSD for their system because the capacity that they need is just like, oh well then I can't afford that capacity. I just won't get one. Do this instead. Touch BIOS, so hybrid EFI technology allows 3TB plus hard drives. Okay, 60%, okay, yeah, yeah. Ready for Intel's next-gen 22nm CPUs. Very cool. Okay, so that's Ivy Bridge. Ready for native PCI Express Gen 3, so upcoming graphics cards that won't be around for a while, but there you go, supports it. Driver MOSFETs. 3x USB power, which is a great feature, allows you to charge more devices or power more devices through a hub. It has 12-phase power design on the board itself, and here's all those E68 features. So Intel HD graphics if you don't want to put in a dedicated graphics card. Quick Sync, which allows you to use the dedicated graphics and an integrated graphics card in order to get great gaming performance and great video encoding performance. Lucid Virtue, that's the switchable graphics that allows you to do that. And support for Intel's K-Series overclocking. Let me see if I'm missing anything else on this very complicated and full-looking box. I don't think so. So let's have a look at what's included. We've got an HDMI to DVI adapter, these are handy. We have an I.O. shield, which is helpfully color-coded. Aha! Flexible black SLI bridge, my very favorite kind. We have four SATA cables, so two are right angle and two of them are straight. We have a user's manual, including a driver DVD. Don't use this, download the latest from the Gigabyte website. As well as a guide for smart response technology, which you probably won't need a guide for because it's so easy with the Gigabyte utility. Multilingual installation guidebook, I actually have a video about that on my NCIXcon channel, so you can feel free to check that out. And I show you how to install SRT technology using the Gigabyte utility, which is basically you download the EXE to your desktop and then you run it. Yeah, really, it's that easy. Although I have had people ask me, so do you install the OS initially to the hard drive? And the answer is yes, you do. And then you add the SSD later. All right, so let's look at the layout of the board overall. It's a very slick-looking all-black board, so we've got almost nothing on here that's not black or white or silver or chrome or some sort of shade in between. We've got, yeah, I know that's white, we've got a little blue accents on some of the capacitors, but look how nice that looks, guys. All right, so there's our LGA1155 socket compatible with the latest Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPUs. We've got a nice beefy power design, which I do not expect to see normally on a UD3-class board. This is more like what I'd expect to see on a UD4 or a UD5-class board, but Gigabyte's really gone all out on this one. We've got our 8-pin power connector in its ideal location in the top left. I'll go through fan headers later. We've got pretty beefy-looking cooling, but they are attached by plastic pegs, so be a little bit careful with those when you're taking them out of the box. Just make sure you've got good contact between the MOSFETs and the heat sinks, and then you shouldn't have too much to worry about. We've got four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting dual-channel memory. We've got our 24-pin connector in its ideal location along the right-hand edge. Gigabyte SATA ports are right here, so those are powered by a third-party chipset. If you're running SATA 3 drives, I would highly recommend you stick with the two Intel-powered ones, which are right here. And then you've also got four SATA 2 connectors to go along with those, so a total of eight SATA connectors. Our chipset heatsink is right here, nice and low-profile, so you're not going to have any problems with graphics cards being interfered with. We've got our front-panel connector, our TPM. We've got front USB 3 right about here. Front high-powered USB 2, so that's for charging your iPad or other tablet with the included utility. And then two more front-panel USB 2 ports. We've got front Firewire, front audio, and then we've got what looks like a fairly ideal setup, so three PCIe 1x, of which two of them will be available when you install a dual-slot graphics card. Two PCI, of which one will be available when you install a dual-slot graphics card, so that gives you room for one, two, three more devices in addition to your SLI or Crossfire graphics cards. And you can have one PCI and two PCIe 1x. On the back of the board, we find almost nothing except you can see that that chipset heatsink, maybe due to its size, is affixed by screws, so that's nice to see. On the back, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight USB 2.0 ports, one of those PS2 mouse keyboard combo ports, optical audio out, HDMI out, that is what gives you the ability to use Lucid Virtue and Intel Quick Sync technology. And then we've got two USB 3.0 ports, gigabit ethernet, and 7.1 audio out. Don't forget also, you know what, I don't think they even mention this on the box, I can't believe they didn't mention that. It must be on here somewhere. Yeah, there it is. Okay, dual BIOS, yeah, don't forget about dual BIOS. Dual BIOS is awesome because it means that if your BIOS gets pooched, you can actually restore to the other BIOS chip, no problem. So that's a very convenient feature, makes it so that you are less likely to brick a gigabyte board with a BIOS flash than anything that doesn't have dual BIOS. Thank you for checking out my video. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer reviews.