welcome to my unboxing of yet another z77 board this one took me a little bit
longer sorry about that but here we are this is the
z77x ud3h gigabytes whole uh slogan for
this is insist on Ultra durable so they mean a new version of ultra durable
Ultra durable has been through a number of revisions so it started with the two
times copper PCB which is better for heat dissipation as well as for
performance and it's now up to ultra durable 4 which includes high
temperature protection humidity protection with their new glass fabric
PCB which apparently allows it to be
more resistant to humidity and moisture uh next is their electrostatic
protection as well as power failure protection so that is ultra durable
according to Gigabyte and they want you to insist on an ultra durable
motherboard for your new pc we also see a couple other Focus things here that is
their patent pending 3D power All Digital engines so that means all
aspects of your CPU and memory are being powered digitally so that is your
onboard GPU your uncore your core your
memory all of that good stuff very cool as well as their 3D bio so what they
mean by 3D BIOS is dual ufi BIOS uh that
is graphical interface BIOS that has um kind of a unique interface I
think they have they usually have a picture of it yeah so there's a picture of it here so they show you like a
picture of a motherboard and you just click on the SATA ports if you want to
change something about your boot order or whatever and it's it's very graphical
so if you want to change something about your CPU or memory you click on the CPU
socket it gives you all the relevant options in one place so this is a an LG
1155 board with the z77 chipset which means we've got support for all that
cool z77 stuff including PCI Express gen
3 as well as Intel's Intel's uh onboard
USB 3 Port so that is the front ports and two rear ports are going to be
powered by the Intel chipset we've got virtue MVP which is an upgraded version
of lucid virt which allows you to use the onboard GPU that's built into the
CPU to do things like transcoding video which is very very fast compared to the
traditional methods but still take advantage of a dedicated graphics card
for 3D games Crossfire and SLI are both
supported as well as the MSA onboard connector but I'll show you more about
that in just a moment so all digital power there you go see CPU Graphics
memory and VT and what else we got load
line calibration okay most modern boards that are somewhat decent for
overclocking do have load line calibration this is a good one smart
response so Gigabyte has a much easier way than their competitors of setting up
smart response it's basically like two clicks on a little application that you
download it's really really simple to set up remember smart response allows
you to take up to a 60 gig SSD and use it as a cache for your boot hard drive
or any other hard drive I guess although I'm not convinced that it makes much
sense to use it on something that's not a boot Drive unless maybe you you play
like MMOs or whatever you have your MMO installed on a separate drive and then
uh that way smart response will make sure that you've got all of the most
relevant things that you use most frequently cached into the SSD so okay I
guess I could kind of see that most games don't benefit much from an SSD in
terms of uh of loading times though so just something to be aware of I would
usually use Smart response for the boot Drive Right accessories
four SATA cables two of them are right angle two of them are not right angle
we've got a flexible black SLI Bridge exactly the right kind we have an IO
Shield a multilingual installation guide book and a user's manual including a DVD
with utilities and drivers which you shouldn't use and you should download the latest off the Gigabyte website here
is the board itself Gigabyte does such a good job of their board Aesthetics these
days we've got just a nice slick black
white and blue color scheme don't worry
these are stickers these are stickers this isn't a sticker this is my one
complaint actually about the x79 board that I'm using in my system right now it
looks so Sleek except for bam orange
light red button so what I'm probably going to do on on that board is just
paint over it in black nail polish or something like that and uh it'll be all
good so there's the LG 1155 socket supporting Second Generation and third
generation Intel core processors code name Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge uh as
well as our power delivery with kind of a neat looking little heat sinky thing
going on with got like an arrow going on in the middle and some wavy looking kind
of things uh the the TDP of the CPUs
that go in here is 77 Watts for Ivy
Bridge or 95 Watts for Sandy Bridge so we don't need a ton of power delivery
we've got an eight pin power connector anyway and it's in its ideal location up
at the top left of the board speaking of Ideal locations I'm personally a big fan
of having the power button up here as opposed to down here the onboard power
button the reason for that is that this is easier to reach when you have a couple graphics cards installed which
sometimes I do we've also got our simos switch Button as well as our reset
switch uh SOS SOS switch I think they mean SOS
clear switch at least I hope that's what they mean there's another clear seos down
here you know what give me a moment here guys I'm going to try and figure this out so this is fairly straightforward
that is the seos clear switch this guy right here switches you between the main
BIOS and the backup BIOS so that's more of like a SEO or um like a BIOS
chip switch and then this one these two jumpers right here are a clear seos
jumper as well so you've got a multitude of different ways to manage the BIOS or
the ufi I should probably sto calling it a BIOS it's not really called that
anymore of this motherboard your 24 pin connectors and its ideal location along
the right-handed Edge and you've got another auxiliary connector here so that's kind of interesting uh someone
actually messaged me not that long ago saying that their friend had
misunderstood uh when I was talking about one of these these connectors on
the x58 OC board from Gigabyte um and
had thought that he could plug his hard drive into it that's not how it works
this is auxiliary power for the motherboard using a SATA power connector
from your power supply so it's if you have multiple graphics cards installed
just for additional stability I can't imagine you'd need it on this board but
it's there if you want it uh we've got two SATA 36 GB per second ports powered
by the Intel chipset as well as four SATA 2 3 GB per second ports please note
SATA port 5 that is uh they're numbered zero to five so the last one is going to
be disabled if you plug something into the M SATA slot here so M SATA as a
standard that's used for ssds particularly useful if you want to run
Intel smart response technology without actually plugging in SSD into a bay in
your case you can just clip it in right there it's just running at SATA 2 3 GB
per second mode we have a post debug LED which has all the codes uh outlined in
the manual we have our front panel connectors for your power and your reset
and all that good stuff front panel USB 2 I couldn't help noticing the absence
of one of their uh supercharging USB ports so that's uh
that's kind of interesting I guess that's a feature this board doesn't have
that the higher end board does have a very useful one indeed it does have
onoff charge though which means that you can charge your devices even when the system is powered off we've also got a
front panel audio header and it's ideal location at the bottom left of the board
and in terms of PCI Express slot layout we have something that actually looks
pretty good so if you have a low-end system that is to say One graphics card
your PCI slot will be accessible which stands to reason whereas if you do a
high-end configuration with dual PCIe graphics cards it will cover that PCI
slot so they kind of aim it towards the higher end of build you go for on this
the fewer Legacy PCI slots will be available which kind of makes sense so
if you do install dual graphics cards you're going to be left with one two PCI
e1x as well as a PCI e8x a
PCIe or sorry and a and a PCIe 4X so if
you're run in SLI or Crossfire these two are going to run in 8X 8X mode but
remember that's PCIe gen 3 with an ivybridge CPU which means that the
bandwidth is equivalent to PCIe Gen 2 16x I forgot to mention earlier that uh
DDR3 dual channel is supported up to four dims and remember guys ivybridge
CPUs will also unlock a plethora of ha I think that's the first time I've used
that word on Tech tips of uh new memory speeds that were not available on Sandy
Bridge CPUs now at the back of the board we find a few interesting things so one
of them is a PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port still like to see those 1 2 3 4 5
six USB 3.0 ports these two of them are running off the Intel chipset and four
of them are not now I have a concern about the fact that this board doesn't
have any USB 2 ports because from time to time usb3 drivers um are not going to
be automatically installed by your OS which means that if you're operating all
of your peripherals based on the back panel ports and you haven't installed
the driver for those ports yet your
keyboard and mouse might not work so I would definitely recommend if you have
one of these boards and you're having trouble with it just use one of your
front headers plug into your front USB 2 in order to get up and running and then
install all your drivers and then these should all work just fine we've also got
VGA DVI HDMI and DisplayPort out options remember with ivybridge you can
support up to three displays out at a time even on onboard Graphics optical
audio out dual eSATA uh gigabit Ethernet
as well as 7.1 analog audio out round
out the I/O options on this board nice
little touches Matt Black PCB using proper screws to attach all of the
coolers on this board in spite of the fact that it is a ud3 level board so
this is not a premium level board another nice touch is the fact that they
have included SLI support even though this is a more value segmented board as
well as oh yeah there's the front USB 3 which I don't think I ever showed you so
uh finally last but not least we have one two three
four five wow that's actually not bad five four pin pwm fan headers and don't
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