apparently in this video we're going to be comparing the cameraman's car to my
car I think the cameraman wins but that's neither here nor there actually
what we're going to be talking about is the Gigabyte x58a ud9 this is a very
exciting board which I've received endless requests to unbox and have a
look at it so let's start with the front of the Box unlocked power with
electricity and lightning bolts all over the place and uh for some reason the
camera wants me to hold this oh maybe he wants me to hold it next to the iPhone
that's here onoff charge that's another really cool feature that we've seen on
some of gigabytes newest boards onoff charge allows you to charge things via
the USB ports whether your computer is on or off hence the name onoff charge so
including iPhones iPods uh whatever else charges by USB let's have a look what
else do we got here delivers maximum CPU power with 24 phase CPU power built into
this board we have support for four-way Crossfire X four-way SLI it has a
three-year warranty in the US and Canada supports Intel's extreme edition six
core CPUs as well as having their 333
onboard acceleration USB 3.0 three times
USB power so that means if you're using a hub you can power three times as many
devices without plugging in an additional power adapter as well as
Ultra durable 3 SATA 3 and any any other
number of three three-year warranty uh I don't know there's got to be three of
something else uh supports i7 i7 extreme
and it's x58 that's three more things okay I don't know where I was
going with that let's take this piece of
cardboard off and have a look at the board so this is all basically the same
stuff um that we saw on the front it has
smart dual landan so you've got land port automatic switching between the two
physical gigabit land chips offering hassle free zero downtime high-speed
network connectivity hybrid silent Pipe 2 so that means you can either hook up
water cooling or you can hook up this huge air cooling heat sink to your board
depending on which route you want to go more unlocked power okay and then let's
go around and have a look at the back of the box which is exactly the same stuff
again okay why don't we just open it up and have a look at this sweet board then
and we'll stop looking at the Box although it is a fairly nice box I'll
definitely give Gigabyte that it's a very snazzy looking box it's very shiny
see I don't know if you can see this in the Sun but you see how like shiny it is
can you can you see those reflective little dots in the oh that's not what I
want you to look at okay let's open up the board further Ado oh I hit the camera
all right so the first thing we're going to find inside here
is oh that was just a teaser the first thing we're going to look at is the
accessories so in terms of accessories we should find a fairly fully loaded
package here uh we have a three-way SLI Bridge we have a four-way SLI Bridge
because both of those configurations are supported we have the users manual as
well as the driver DVD don't use this download the latest off the Gigabyte
website we have oh hold on hold on uh
congratulations on your oh neat okay we
have a Gigabyte uh VIP card okay uh what do you get register
today for a chance to win an Apple
iPad cool okay uh we have a gigaby
sticker some extra motherboard standoffs and I'll explain why we need those in a
minute we have a smart 6 users manual as well as a multilingual installation
guide book then on the other side we have some SATA 6 gbit per second
cables uh four of them to be precise oh wow yeah four okay and then
we have an i cable we have two long
Crossfire Bridges we have an EA bracket
so this includes power 2 EA ports and that all plugs in internally and then a
couple of Molex or one Molex to two SATA power adapter so that means you can just
plug in be drives it's very convenient for storage as well as two e SATA to
SATA cables we have an IO shield and a
third Crossfire Bridge no that's an SL oh okay that's a straight SLI Bridge
these are two Crossfire Bridges and then we have three-way and four-way SLI
Bridges so that pretty much takes care of the entire accessory package for this
particular board go ahead and put all that back in there do that and now we
will have a look finally at the board itself no I'm lying again okay we're
going to have a look at the extreme
cooler that you can actually put on top of the the hybrid silent pipe that you
can put on top of it this is the same one that we've seen included ever since
the x58 extreme oh there's a a sticker
that fell off here okay supports an extra 8 Pin CPU connector so the first
thing that you should notice about this board if you're a very observant viewer
is that it is not a standard ATX board
so right here you can see a gap between
where normally you'd have the first slot and where the first slot actually is on
this board so here I'm just going to grab a board my ghetto ancient motherboard that
I use to compare size every once in a while so we're going to just put that
over top of the Gigabyte 9 and you can
see it's quite a bit longer on the bottom and also quite a bit wider so
this is sort of an XL ATX eatx sort of
hybrid form factor board and uh yeah so that's the first
thing that you'll notice you'll also notice it has seven PCI Express 16x
slots although they're not all electrical 16x so this one this one this
one and this one are all actually wired for 16x while this one this one and this
one are only wired for
8X next we have uh yeah that's pretty
cool so that's the cooler that is going to be cooling the uh the self Bridge as
well as the nf200 chips that power this particular board uh that's the way that
Gigabyte was able to achieve so many PCI
Express slots you can actually populate every single slot I believe they'll all
run at 8X and I don't recall whether it's using one nf200 chip or or two
nf200 chips uh so if you know the answer to that please post it in the comments
under the video and I would be eternally grateful so why don't we start at the
CPU socket I'll start over again uh this is an LGA 1366 socket it's fairly bog
standard as far as that goes it is a loat socket so you don't have to worry
about any problems with the CPU contacting the pins correctly if you are
concerned about that sort of thing to the left of the socket we have two 8 Pin
EPS connectors so that means you can deliver a whole lot of power to that CPU
through this motherboard although you only need to plug in one of them you can
see this little sticker here supports an extra CPU 8 Pin power connector next we
have six DDR3 module slots they are running in
triple channel so the first ones you're going to populate are going to be the white ones and then you'd populate the
blue ones it supports up to 24 gigs of memory our 24 pin connectors in its
ideal location along the right hand edge of the board and also along the right
hand edge of the board and I love this you've got your power and reset switches
this is where they belong not at the bottom of the board because whether
you're on a test bench or whether you're in a case it's hard to get at switches
that are down at the very bottom right of the board this is always easy to
access cuz it's next to your RAM where there won't be a video card or a CPU
heat sink overhanging it perfect thank you Gigabyte good work next we have yes
four SATA 3 6 gbit per second Port so
the white ones are colorcoded for SATA 6 GB per second we have an IDE port in
between them and then we have six SATA 2 3 gbit per second ports running off of
the Intel Southbridge we have an LED uh
diagnostic the display right here we have our front panel connectors front
USB front USB front USB front fire wire
a floppy connector just in case you are still have a floppy drive and then we
have two additional Molex connectors so
one here at the very Bott bottom left and then one up above the PCI Express
slots and those are going to be to provide auxiliary power to a super beefy
graphics card configuration that you might want to plug into a board like
this so let's have a bit of a closer look at the cooling solution I know we
looked at the self Bridge cooling before I'm not talking about that chip
cameraman okay we had a closer look at the self Bridge solution before so
that's here that's just a big block of metal basically and then we're going to
be relying on because there isn't actually a whole lot of cooling
potential here so if you're water cooling this board only the CPU I'd be a
little bit concerned because there's a whole lot of stuff here to cool you've
got your uh SATA 6 um SATA 6 chipset
down here you got your South Bridge you got your North Bridge you got an nf200
or two don't forget to write a comment if you know you've got your mosfets and
that's a whole lot of stuff and you've only got these heat sinks right here and
that's pretty much it I mean this doesn't really have any air cooling potential to it it's got like a little
tiny heat sink in there but that's not getting any air flow and then this is
just a big block of metal so you either need to connect the hybrid silent pipe
or you need to connect water cooling to the North Bridge block right here and
that's what's going to take care of cooling all of this stuff because it is
all connected via heat pipes so as long as you cool this spot right here you
make sure you take care of your mosfets as well as all of your chipsets on a
board like this front audio connector is here and let's have a look at the back
connectivity on this motherboard so so first of all we've got two PS2 ports
personally I think that's necessary I like PS2 ports they're useful uh yeah
it's Legacy but I don't think it's that big of a deal next we've got cameraman
wants it at this angle for some reason all right next we've got digital audio
out so we have Optical as well as coaxial we have a clear Simo switch and
it's absolutely idealist possible location on the back panel you can
always reach that no matter what is installed on the board we have two
firewire ports we have two USB 2.0 ports
two USB 2.0 eat combo ports let me just
double check that that is indeed what those are yes it is we have two more USB
2.0 ports two USB 3.0 ports 2 gbit
landan as well as 7.1 audio out so thank
you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Gigabyte x58a ud9 and
just for scale I'm going to take the cameraman's iPhone again and show you
just how huge this board is yeah that's
right the South Bridge heat SN is like the size of an
iPhone