 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the P8Z77V Deluxe from Asus. This supports the latest Intel processors, that is to say second generation Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors on the LGA 1155 platform and also supports, at the time of publishing this, upcoming Intel processors. So that is 22 nanometer, code name Ivy Bridge, third generation Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPUs. It also has a bunch of other Asus specific technology that we'll get more into as we go along, but let's start with their dual intelligent processors 3, so that is the third generation of that particular initiative, their EPU and TPU, which are dedicated processors, allowing you to either take advantage of the best power efficiency or get the best performance out of your system, as well as their eighth generation digital power design, which is now across the board, haha board, get it, across the board on their Z77 chipset boards. This board is SLI ready, it supports AMD Crossfire X, Virtue MVP, which gives you better performance, less tearing in high frame rate scenarios, as well as the flexibility to plug into whatever port you want and still take advantage of Intel Quick Sync technology. Next we've got support for Smart Response technology, as well as Intel's Asus SSD caching, so more on that in a moment. It is Windows 7 ready and it sure as well better be. Ultimate Cooling Quiet is supported with their Fan Expert 2, I mean, okay, they can call it Ultimate Cooling Quiet all they want, but what it is, is actually cooler than that because you can set fully custom fan curves, user configurable fan curves, according to how you want your system to sound or how you want your cooling performance to go. Wi-Fi Go is included, so this, in this particular board, is a dual band solution, allowing you to not only use Wi-Fi, but also Bluetooth. It is a DLNA server, which is really really cool, so you can stream media to various devices around your house as long as they support DLNA, and it is also dual band, which means that it's going to give you the best performance. I mean, okay, maybe not as good as like a dedicated card, but as good as you could possibly expect from onboard Wi-Fi on a motherboard. Smart Digi Plus, okay, OC Performance Boost, okay, we've got more about their precise power control, so yes, they're high-end boards. I mean, these days, there's not as much logic built onto a board anymore as there used to be because we've gotten to the point where the memory controller, the PCI Express controller, are both built onto the CPU itself, so it's not really left in the chipset anymore. So what it comes down to when you want the best possible overclocking and you want to choose the best possible motherboard now is pretty much the quality of the components that they're using. So if you really want to go balls to the walls as far as overclocking goes, I'd still suggest you go with an Asus TUF series board or an ROG series board, but if you want sort of all of those consumer-friendly features as well, then the P8Z77V Deluxe is not a bad choice either because you're going to get that balanced approach and you're not going to get that far-out aesthetic if you don't care about the red color scheme or the like, I mean here, we have a saber-tooth board over here, or like the thermal armor, kind of, there it is, thermal armor, kind of coolness going on, then you can go with the more mainstream-oriented boards. And here I haven't missed any major features before we get too much further in. So Dual Intelligent Processor 3, got it, okay, Smart Digi Plus technology, yep, got it. Actually one thing that's really cool about their new digital VRM, well not really new digital VRM, but their new controls for their digital VRM, is that you can actually set a power threshold for your system and then it will dynamically adjust the performance of your CPU according to whatever you set. So if you're in something like an office environment and you're deploying a ton of systems, you're probably not going to be using deluxe-level boards, but the good news is that it's actually supported on the lower end boards as well. So you can control the power that your systems are consuming in your office very easily. USB BIOS Flashback, this is a fantastic feature without a CPU or memory installed. You can easily just throw a BIOS file on a USB drive, press the button and restore, there, and recover your BIOS just like that. ASUS USB 3 Boost technology means that you can either use USB-attached SCSI or UASP to dramatically improve the performance of supported USB 3 devices. So anything supports the USB-attached SCSI protocol, or sorry, no, not everything supports the USB-attached SCSI protocol, but everything supports their standard minimal boost one, which just doesn't use the normal USB protocol. UEFI BIOS, this is pretty much par for the course these days, and network eye control. So because ASUS is using Intel LAN across the board, haha, I did it again, on their motherboards for this generation of products, come on, the eye control functionality works on all of them. So that is that you can prioritize various packets or various programs according to how you want the performance of them to go. So you can prioritize your games, you can de-prioritize things like torrents or whatever else you might have running in the background that you don't want to affect your gaming experience. So let's do accessories really quick here and then we'll move on to the board itself. So we've got a user guide, other more different user guides, so that's for UEFI GO, that's for the board itself. That is your Drivers and Utilities DVD, download the latest from the ASUS website. This board comes in AHCI mode on the SATA ports, that is a very good thing, that means if you're running an SSD, you will get the maximum performance out of the box without tuning anything. Here we go, dual band wireless antennas, or dual band wireless network adapters require two antennas, so there is our UEFI GO adapter. So remember this guy is good for Bluetooth as well as 802.11abgn, and you've got your two spots there to plug in those antennas. We have an IO shield, front panel connector, assisting Q connectors, so this allows you to more easily plug in your front power switch and etc. as well as one of your front USB tubes. It also included SLI bridge, remember your Crossfire bridge should come with your graphics card. And then three packages of SATA cables, so four SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables, so those are all straight to right angle, and two SATA 2 3 gigabit per second cables, and those are all straight to right angle as well. I'm actually just going to shift around a little bit here, and here we go. So you can see all the various phases of digital power delivery surrounding the LGA1155 socket, so that as I mentioned before, supports pretty much any LGA1155 CPU that you would deem it fitting to put in it. Up here we find our 8 pin power connector in its ideal location up at the top left. We find ASUS' new VRM cooling design, which looks pretty slick, it looks kind of like a cityscape or something along those lines. We've also got a heat pipe running all the way through this one down to one of the chipset coolers as well as we've got our other chipset cooler which is using a matching sort of aesthetic. These boards look really really good, and if you're like me, then yes it matters. Sorry guys, I know I'm shallow. We've got four USB 3.8, four DDR3 slots supporting dual channel operation, as well as a MemoK button. Using that button basically means that even if you have high spec memory that doesn't necessarily post correctly in any board, this should set you to a safe default that will get it booted up so that you can tweak it and get it to the right settings. There's our TPU button for one touch overclocking, although I would definitely recommend if you want an easy overclocking experience, use the one in AI Suite because it will correctly tune for your individual processor rather than unnecessarily turning up the voltage too high to get a lower clock speed or not getting the most clock speed possible out of the CPU that you happen to have. Our 24 pin power connector is in its ideal location along the right hand edge, and we have a front USB 3.0 header right about here. That one is going to be running off of the Intel USB 3.0 chipset. Remember that four of the USB 3.0 ports on this board are using an Intel chipset and four of them are using the ASMedia chipset that supports UASP. The Intel one does not at this time. Alright, moving down here we've got four SATA 2.0 3Gbps ports. I'm running off the Intel chipset. Two SATA 3.0 6Gbps ports running off the Intel chipset. And finally the SSD caching ports, so these are running off of a Marvell chipset. So a suggested usage scenario for something like this is you have an SSD for your boot drive, you run that off the Intel chipset for the best single drive performance, and then if you have like a Steam driver or like a games drive, something along those lines, instead of plugging that into a SATA 2.0 port, you can plug it into one of these ports and then use a small SSD to cache your favorite game so that they load a little bit more quickly. Moving on down we have our front panel connectors, our TPU chip, yes it is an actual processor on the board unlike many competing solutions. We've also got a post debugging LED. Two USB 2.0 front panel headers, a clear CMOS button, I still like to have a dedicated button for this rather than shorting out two pins so that's nice to see. A Thunderbolt header, so yes, you can buy an add-in piece that goes right in here and plugs into there and you can add Thunderbolt to any ASUS Z77 board except the WS one. Here's our EPU button for better power efficiency as well as our front panel audio header. This right here is very expensive, that is a PCIe 3.0 PLX PCI Express switching chip, so that is one of the unique things about the Deluxe Level Board is that it is able to dynamically allocate the available PCIe lanes, because remember those are limited due to the PCI Express controller being on the CPU itself in order to give you the best possible performance of all the various features on the board no matter what you have installed. That's one of the reasons we're able to have so many PCIe slots on this board. Four PCIe 1x, three PCIe 16x, although this is only really a two-way SLI or Crossfire board so you're only going to really want to use these for that because these are the ones that are going to be running directly off the CPU. This one is going to be a little bit slower as it has to, there's more overhead involved in this slot. Remember guys though, even if you're running 8x, 8x mode with two high-end cards, this is PCIe 3, so as long as you're running PCIe 3 cards, that is 7970, 7950s, GTX 680s, then you will still be getting the same bandwidth as PCIe 2.0 16x. Moving along to the back of the board, we have four USB 2.0 ports, six USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA ports, optical audio out, HDMI and DisplayPort out, dual LAN, one of them being Intel gigabit LAN, USB BIOS flashback button, so that's the button that you press when you have a USB device plugged in in order to flashback the BIOS, as well as 7.1 audio out. On the back of the board, we've got a couple of little heatsinks here, let me just see if there's anything crazy that I might have missed before I get any further. LucidMVP talked about that. DDR3 1600MHz JDEC. Ah, the fan control curves. Slick says I didn't talk about that, I think I did though. It's okay, it doesn't matter. You can set dynamically, you can dynamically adjust the fan curves in order to... Okay, I don't know what he's talking about. Something about the... Oh yeah, right, fan headers. Sorry guys. So, one, two PWM four-pin fan headers, three, four, five, and six. So you can plug in pretty much as many PWM fans as your heart desires, and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.