welcome to my unboxing and first look at the z77x ud4h from Gigabyte this is sort
of a uh lowest that I would recommend
motherboard because when you go any lower than this you start to compromise
features that matter and this is where you start to get into the features that
I think matter the most without spending an exorbitant amount of money on things
that most people won't use so for example you've got the support for all
the latest core I3 i5 and i7 processors you've got their fully digital power
design as well as their 3D uh dual UEFI
BIOS which basically makes it almost impossible to Brick one of their boards
by flashing the BIOS or whatever else you get Crossfire and SLI compatibility
it does support virtue MVP which is basically the way that you can use the
onboard graphics on your CPU in order to transcode video and use your dedicated
graphics for gaming PCI Gen 3 is a given these days Ultra durable 4 is pretty
much all the old Ultra durable stuff in addition to the new glass fabric PCB
that makes it humidity resistant All Digital power so CPU Graphics memory and
the uncore as it used to be called I have no idea what we call it now
apparently VT and then they talk a little bit about load line calibration
versus not load line calibration although it's very debatable you know
lots of people believe you should use it you shouldn't use it um here's a closer
look at what their PCB design looks like Intel smart response allows you to use
an SSD to cach your hard drive to make it go faster surprisingly few people use
it but they should it's awesome and their easy smart response utility is
actually the e easiest way to set up smart response and it only works on
Gigabyte boards I have used it before and it's awesome electrostatic
protection is cool so what it amounts to is for example um many motherboard
manufacturers will do one fuse for sort of a bunch of USB ports whereas Gigabyte
does one fuse per Port so if something gets Zapped at least you're going to
lose less of the functionality of your board included accessories are pretty
barebone so you got four SATA cables an SLI Bridge remember Crossfire bridges
are included with your graphics card a Gigabyte sticker multilingual
installation guide book a user manual a driver disc which you aren't going to use and you're going to download the
latest off the manufacturer website and of course a colorcoded IO shield look at
all that usb3 that be all over dis board
because it has not only the Intel USB 3
that comes with the z77 chipset but
also third party USB 3 Gigabyte has done
such a good job of cleaning up their color schemes over the last couple of
generations so I'm going to start in the place that I usually do which is the CPU
socket got lots of room around there for large coolers as well as lots of cooling
for your mosfets so it looks like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 so that's probably
like an 8 plus 3phase power design or something along those lines um either
way it's using G I mean yeah quite
frankly with an ivy Bridge CPU as long as you've got a good quality board which
is again why I sort of recommend starting at that ud4 range you're not
going to be limited in your overclocking Endeavors by your CPU power delivery
unless you're going Subzero or doing something exotic this is ample for air
and water cooling we've got a single 8 Pin CPU connector up here which is all
you need for an ivybridge CPU you've got a clear seos button as well as a reset
switch and a power switch up here at the top right you've got four DDR3 slots
supporting up to 32 gigs of DDR3 memory your 24 pin connector and its ideal slot
along the right and you've got an auxiliary SATA connector this is kind of
Handy if you are installing multiple high powerered graphics cards so if
you're going to throw a couple GTX 69s in here or something I do recommend
plugging in a SATA connector and it'll give a little bit more power to those
graphics card slots and reduce the risk of burning out any of the pins on your
24 pin here front USB 3 is over here on
the right this is where I do like to see it although a right angle connector would be even better and over here we've
got SATA 3 off the Intel chipset SATA 2 off the Intel chipset so two of those
and four of those and Mora 3 off of a thirdparty chipset we've also got a
front post indicator LED as well as the front panel connectors and the BIOS
switch which switches between BIOS 1 and BIOS 2 which are two physical chips on
the board itself three USB 2.0 headers
are down here on the bottom as well as the trusted platform module and front
panel audio no fire wire on this board that's starting to disappear even on
fully featured boards like this one and for our PCI Express slot Loadout I think
it's pretty solid actually so if you have a single dual slot graphics card
installed that's going to leave you with one two PCIe 1X 2 PCIe 16x physical and
a PCI um however bear in mind guys that this is 16x physical if you populate
both of these it's going to be 8X 8X this is an 8X slot and this one is a 4X
that runs off the chipset itself as opposed to off of the CPU so I wouldn't
recommend populating this with a graphics card and this PCI slot will be
covered by a dual graphics card solution but what that means is you're going to be left with one one and four left for
further expansion which if you're running a dual graphics card setup you probably have a pretty highend computer
anyway so I understand gigabytes rationale when they did that in terms of
fan connectors we got one two four pin three four pin four four pin five four
pin ah ah ah ah ah which is pretty good and you have full support for
configuring those within the BIOS matte black PCB which I've started to take for
granted I remember I used to rant and Rave about how awesome it is uh but
there are other little details that matter check out the way gigabytes using
screws as opposed to plastic push pins to keep on all the cooling that means
that no matter what happens in transit your board will probably arrive in a
working condition and finally on the back check out all that USB 3 you've got
six USB 3.0 ports DVI VGA HDMI and
DisplayPort out PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port is included optical audio out
is included two EA ports gigabit
Ethernet and 7.1 audio and check this out gigabytes also built in uh dedicated
USB keyboard and mouse ports here this is to increase compatibility as well as
sometimes what manufacturers do is they include ports that are optimized for a
1,000 htz pulling rate which gives you that extra little tiny Edge in terms of
responsiveness assuming your keyboard and mouse do support that feature so
high temperature protection onoff charge so even if the computer's powered down
you can charge devices using USB and all
Japanese solid caps which we've again started to take for granted at this
point and oh right don't forget gigabytes 3x power for their USB ports
meaning that you can charge devices faster and you can run more devices I'm
pointing at the SATA ports you can run more devices off their USB ports without
using a powered Hub just passively don't forget to subscribe to lus techtips for
more unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thank you for checking out this one on the z77x ud4