welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Gigabyte z77x up5 th this is one of the first
boards with the allnew ultra durable five which is Ultra Cool Ultra efficient
Ultra performance and finally Ultra current cap High current
capability should be ultra current capability because check this out
they're using an all new Power delivery
system that is basically as expensive to implement on a motherboard as like
building another cost motherboard and like giving it to you at the same time
as you buy this motherboard is extremely expensive on Gigabyte side but it is
unprecedented in terms of the power delivery that it can achieve there's no
coil lne it runs cooler which should achieve better overclocking because
having those hot vrms all you know up in your CPU socket area is not helping
things stay cooler on more traditional power Delivery Systems so let's go
through some of the other stuff you got all support for all the latest Intel core I3 i5 i7 processors their UEFI 3D
uh 3D BIOS as well as their 3D power which is all digital power for the CPU
the memory as well as the um the uncore
this board supports Thunderbolt so we'll talk more about that later and it comes
with a 300 megabit per second dualband Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 card because it
is ultra durable in general it has their 2x copper PCB as well as their glass
fabric PCB which offers humidity protection if you live somewhere very
humid such as in Southeast Asia for example where you know just general
humidity in the air can eventually cause problems for some computer components so
here we can see what Gigabyte has to say about their single package design with
their industry-leading 60 amp rated power stage which is a phenomenal amount
of power to be able to deliver to a CPU
I mean you might even go as far as to say totally unnecessary but if you want
to get the best overclocks every little bit helps so traditional mosfets are hot
lower RDS on mosfets are cooler and their new power stage mosfets are the
coolest so this is all taken with thermal imaging
configuration okay overclocking stability okay good and excellent so if
you overheat ah yes this is interesting so if the power delivery system runs
cooler it actually also runs more efficiently and more stably so uh that's
that's just a general function the fact that it can deliver more power stably of
the fact that it does run cooler dual ufi BIOS means that even if you have
some kind of a failure while you're flashing the BIOS you can recover it quite easily using their utility uh
you've also got power failure protection so they build this into the board itself
so that even if there's some kind of a problem with a short they have fuses
built in that will potentially protect the parts dual thunderbow is built in
with dual 10 GB per second capability so if you want to plug in like you know a
dozen Thunderbolt devices Daisy chained all over the place and have 20 gbit per
second uh data to the whole thing then you can go ahead and do that sound
blaster xfi is built and that pretty much does it for the Box
let's open this bad boy up and I just love gigabytes styling these
days I mean honestly some of their uh
some of their G1 series stuff doesn't really do it for me with like guns and
whatnot on it but they uh they're uh
they they're just their UD series boards
are just oh they're just like look at this matte black p PCB every possible
feature without overdoing it on the PCB SI so this is a standard ATX
configuration they also have built in the full Seven slots of expansion in
spite of all the extra functionality that's on this particular board let's
start unpacking some of the accessories here so you guys can have a look at them
great accessory package including that fabulous Gigabyte sticker flexible black
SLI Bridge the very best kind clean IO
shield with color cating on the appropriate part a
USB cable it's probably for something I
think it's for this guy actually all right let's go ahead and open this up
and then we are ready to go through it so we've also got a users manual with
driver disc for a variety of things just download the latest off the Gigabyte
website as well as a uh users manual for
what is presumably the wireless card setting up the software and a
multilingual installation guide book that you probably won't need if you
watch the Linus Tech or rather NC Tech tiits video on how to how to uh build
your new pc so yeah that's USB right there so that can plug into any one of
the PCI e1x slots and here's something cool about gigabytes implementation of
their Wi-Fi Bluetooth module this is just a Wi-Fi Bluetooth
module I've seen ASUS do this before where they include some kind of a module
that fits on the board but they actually put all the logic on the board itself so
that you can't just take the card as an extra value add in install it in one of
your other PCS if you want so kudos to Gigabyte for giving users the
flexibility to you know maybe in 5 years when they're not using this board
anymore to still have you know a Wi-Fi Bluetooth module you know that they can
continue to use also nice finishing touches black PCB even on the add-in
card so many times I've seen you know like a gorgeous looking board like this
and they include like an ugly Brown SLI Bridge or they include like little addin
card that's got like a green or brown PCB on it nope not Gigabyte they are not
about that these days six SATA 3 6 GB
connect uh 6 GB per second cables you've
got a front USB 3.0 uh 3 and 1/2 in Bay
device so if your case doesn't support front USB 3 then you'll have it I think
I covered pretty much all this stuff antennas so those are the Dual antennas
for your Dual Band Wi-Fi and now let's get along to the board itself so this
thing has everything there are those
Premium Power phases that are just
baller as heck because yeah I'm I'm
totally I'm totally down for those uh there's your CPU socket so again you
know all the latest processors if you want to overclock make sure you get a K
series processor because those are the ones that are going to allow you to
crank up the voltage crank up the multiplier and really get the best
results anything nonk Series this board is probably going to be wasted on it
your eight pin power connectors in its ideal location in the top left of the
board and you've got your full support for the usual up to 32 gigs so 4X 8 gig
dual Channel memory your onboard switches are all up here perfect this is
this is perfect so the seos clear reset and power and instead of having them
down here where as soon as you load a couple graphics cards into it you can't really reach them this is the ideal
location for an open test bench all your voltage checkpoints are right here so
you can use a Multimeter in order to check any one of these different things
including your V core as well as your integrated memory controller all that
good stuff your memory uh moving down to along the right hand Edge you got your
24 pin connector and it's ideal location uh post LED again this is a much better
location than down here because you can actually see it uh wow check this out
you guys three one two three front panel
USB 3 headers that is absolutely outstanding I don't think I've seen that
before auxiliary SATA power connector so this do not plug this out to a drive
that is not how this works this is auxiliary power for your PCI Express
slot so you plug SATA power into this 2
SATA 3 6 GB per second ports 4 SATA 2 3
gbit per second ports all in a right angle in their ideal locations uh you've
got an additional SATA port so this is SATA 36 GB per second and that's
probably the same chipset that's powering the EA on the back of the board
PCI Express slot layout is pretty good
actually so you've got your 1X you throw your Wi-Fi module in there your dual
slot card will then cover that which will leave you with a 1x slot an 8X
electrical slot a PCI slot just in case you still got something Legacy you want
to use as well as a PCIe Forex slot so these are physical 16 but they're wired
for either 16 88 or 884 and this four is
running off the chipset so it's a little bit slower not ideal for SLI or
Crossfire configuration for all intents and purposes this is a two-way SLI and
two-way Crossfire board although three-way Crossfire is supported front
panel connectors are here as well as there's your high power usb2 front panel
header your normal usb2 front panel header remember this one is better for
charging things like iPads or other tablets trusted platform module front
panel fire wire front audio and then here is all of your onboard audio um all
your onboard audio stuff this this is cool so this MSA Port actually maybe
that's what that oh I don't know what that's doing that probably Powers down
one of these SATA ports so yeah port five port five turns off if you populate
this so you can use this for things like smart response technology or even just as a regular SSD it's totally up to the
individual end user so where's our Thunderbolt chipset oh there we go right
there so there's your Thunderbolt chipset close to the Thunderbolt ports
as you'd expect remember guys Thunderbolt won't work unless you're
using the Intel onboard audio so that means you can either use Lucid virtue
MVP which allows you to use the onboard audio for what it's good at which is
things like video transcoding and making sure you're using Thunderbolt and then
you can use your dedicated video to power any kind of 3D games even if
you're running the display off of the Thunderbolt port in terms of IO you've
got lots of different onboard display options so BGA DVI HDMI and remember
these Thunderbolt ports can also terminate to mini DisplayPort so that's
uh effectively all the major players four USB 3.0 ports which gives you a
total of 10 10 USB 3.0 ports potentially
can run off this board two USB 2.0 ports which are great for legacy devices like
if you need to uh uh use a bootable USB or something like that it tends to have
a slightly better compatibility same thing with like keyboards and mice so I'm glad they're still including those
gigabit Ethernet as well as optical audio out and 7.1 audio out the back of
the board is pretty much what you'd expect so you got a couple of cooling uh
heat sinks here as well as your back plate and using all screws all hard
mounts for all of the front components of the board so thank you for checking
out my unboxing and first look at gigabytes GA z77x up5 th this has a few
firsts including its dual Thunderbolt ports don't forget to subscribe to l
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