 Welcome to another motherboard unboxing. This is the Z77X, which as you guys might imagine uses the Z77 chipset from Intel UD5H. UD implies that there is ultra durable technology, but wait! It's not ultra durable 5 because that's not out yet. The highest ultra durable we have is ultra durable 4 and this one has it. So moving along, we've got their 3D BIOS logo here which includes the dual UEFI BIOS with their unique graphical interface that allows you to actually click on the various parts of your board in order to access them. So you want to access things about the SATA ports, you just click on the SATA ports. A bit more intuitive than, you know, shoot where do they usually keep that? See I can't even remember where they usually keep the SATA options because they're all over the place. It can be in like integrated peripherals sometimes. What does that even mean? Integrated peripheral SATA port? Anyway, so Gigabyte wants to make that simpler. It also includes 3D power which is their all digital engine, meaning they are using all digital PWM for this particular motherboard. This supports the latest Intel Core i7 third generation processors on the 1155 socket, Z77 chips that we covered, PCI Express Gen 3 is supported by this board so you want to run your latest GTX 680. I guess by the time you watch this video it might not be the latest but 680 or Radeon HT 7970 and get the absolute most out of it, yes the extra 1% or so PCI Express Gen 3 is the way to go. It's more important for SLI or Crossfire though and I'll cover that more later. The M-SATA connector is on board which I'll cover more once we've opened it up and ultra durable 4 so this is a bunch of stuff. High temperature protection, humidity protection using their new woven glass fiber, sorry, woven glass fabric PCB which can be relevant if you are in a high humidity environment such as say for example Taiwan or I mean you know I've had situations where I've accidentally spilled water on a board I hope it would help with that although you know no promises there guys. Electrostatic protection so they've integrated circuitry that actually protects the board from being damaged in the event of an electrostatic accident and power failure protection once again. Design choices that they've made to help mitigate the risk of that permanently damaging your motherboard so we'll leave that there so that we don't miss anything. Okay and let's open this bad boy up so the motherboard comes first but I'm gonna make you guys wait for it and we'll go through the... no no no calm down slick we'll do the motherboard later. I'm gonna go through the accessories first so we have two right angle SATA cables, one right angle SATA cable and a straight SATA cable so three right angles and one straight then we have a USB 3.0 front panel three and a half inch bay user manual as well as driver and utility DVD don't use this download the latest from the Gigabyte website there's also huh look at that they they opened it up to the page with the box contents and the motherboard layout see those are the little touches that you got to appreciate. Gigabyte sticker, multilingual installation guidebook with more languages than I can speak we have a flexible black SLI bridge the very best kind we also have an IO plate that is handily color-coded love color coding love things that are black and love small finishing touches so far Gigabyte A plus as far as the included accessories are going next let's get the board opened up here this is a reseal board it's a sample board so yeah yours won't look like that unless you buy this one haha no just kidding you won't get this one here we go so you know what let's shift our angle a little bit here I meant turn the camera off and we're ready all right so at the very center of the board the very focal point for me is the new well not new LGA 1155 socket supporting the new IV bridge code named Intel core i7 and i5 and i3 generation 3 processors the thing we also find right next to it is another cool Intel technology that is Intel smart response technology you can throw a little PCI ESSD in here not going to take up any of your PCI slots or any of your SATA ports and you can use that to run Intel SRT caching off of a drive that you have connected to the system very very cool alright we've got our power delivery circuitry here along with beefy heat sinks that are connected by a heat pipe to the beefy heat sink that is also installed on the chipset itself we have our 8 pin connector in its ideal location at the top left of the board and we'll go around and count the PWM fan headers at the end of the video this right here is dual channel DDR3 memory supporting up to four DIMMs that so that is a chipset thing guys this is not a replacement for x79 this is a replacement for z68 so we still see dual channel DDR3 we have a CMOS switch as well as a reset switch and a power button built into the most sensible possible location up here at the top right of the board now this is excellent this is excellent this is only a UD5 level board so this isn't even a top end board but look at this it's got all of your voltage checkpoints that's that's like outstanding I cannot stress enough how outstanding that is you can check all your voltages with a multimeter even on this like sort of high-end but not quite like a UD7 or or G1 series board very cool the 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the far right of the board and check this out if you want additional power for your graphics cards you can use a SATA connector instead of a molex I think this is a great design choice and I yeah appreciate that as a user all right here we go SATA 2 port will be disabled when mSATA slot is in use so there you go it is running off of the okay so you do use up a port but I guess you get the benefit of it like it looking badass and you don't have to use up an actual bay in your case so there there's the benefit all right these guys right here are SATA 3 6 gigabit per second these ones right here are SATA 2 3 gigabit per second and these ones are also oh sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry these four are SATA 2 6 3 gigabit per second and then these four are SATA 3 6 gigabit per second this one is also SATA 3 6 gigabit per second and check this out 2 front panel USB 3.0 ports so this is interesting because according to the Intel 3 front panel USB 3.0 ports this is interesting because according to the Intel spec the front panel USB 3 port like the Intel the Intel USB 3 ports have to be integrated with two in the front two in the back so on this particular board you're going to be allowed to choose whether you want to run off of the Intel USB 3 chip or off of the third party USB 3 chip we have another SATA 3 port I think I mentioned that and here are all of our front panel switches front USB with extra power for faster charging front panel USB 2 with not extra power for charging we have our TPM slot as well as a front firewire and front audio gigabyte has started putting front audio at the bottom of the board kudos gigabyte it used to be here and this is better alright having a look at the back of the board so the Z77 chipset supports onboard video on supported Intel Core i whatever you know processors that do have onboard video all the ivy bridge ones do so we've got VGA DVI HDMI and display port so the full gamut of options and what's cool is that with lucid virtue MVP we actually get a lot more options in terms of a how to connect your monitor because you can connect it either to the discrete graphics card or the onboard graphics card and you can choose the motor i mode whether you whichever one is connected to it doesn't matter also you can use ok assuming the game supports it it comes down to software support again assuming that the game supports it you can use virtue MVP to actually dramatically improve the performance of a discrete graphics card by having the onboard GPU handle basic tasks and leaving the more complicated things such as tessellation to your direct x11 graphics card interesting hey alright moving on we've got optical audio out to USB 2.0 ports an additional USB 2.0 port ok firewire for USB 3.0 ports the two of these are off the Intel chipset two of them are off a third-party chipset 2 gigabit ethernet ports and 7.1 audio so right I said I was going to go back and count all the PWM fan header so here we go one two don't come in too close so that they can see where they are I think 123455 PWM fan headers so don't forget oh right right right right sorry I almost forgot so it's also got integrated creative sound blaster x5 mb2 audio which has a built-in headphone amplifier so this is not quite as advanced a design as they've used on the past on their g1 motherboards but it's going to be a heck of a lot better than your standard onboard audio and then what else are we missing here hold on let me just make sure I didn't miss anything guys Intel gigabit ethernet right yes one of these two built-in lands is Intel so as opposed to a third-party chipset which a lot of users do prefer and finally you know what let's go back to the back of the box where they do have some of their other stuff sorry guys this is in lieu of notes so that outlines actually yeah you guys can just look at that if you really want to that outlines the benefits of ultra durable for which has continued to bring you know the same standard things like 2 ounce copper BCB which is for better heat dissipation as well as less interference along with a whole bunch of other cool stuff so I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the z77 xud5 h and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Texas for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and don't forget you can always benefit from all digital power that is the CPU the VTT the memory and the Intel HD graphics which are all digitally powered I guess the slot layout sorry guys I forgot three PCIe 1x slots two PCIe 16x okay three PCIe 16x slots but more on that in a minute and one PCI slot so I mentioned that PCIe 3 support was going to be important for SLR crossfire users on this platform that is because these are not both full 16x it's 16x or 8x 8x if you have two cards in them as per the same limitations as the z68 platform it's z68 right yeah z68 Wow dirt moment there guys right so remember PCIe 3.0 8x is the same bandwidth as PCIe 16x 2.0 so that means that if you're running PCIe 3 on your CPU remember you need a PCIe 3 CPU as well as your graphics parts that 8x bandwidth is going to be the same as last generation 16x so there should be no performance bottleneck there at all finally this PCIe 4x slot requires an ivy bridge third-gen CPU for more information please refer to the user manual so there you go 16x 60 are 8 8 or and 4x assuming you're using an ivy bridge CPU you