Gigabyte X79-UD5 LGA2011 SB-E SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,117 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to an unboxing of the first motherboard that I've seen from Gigabyte
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that has more of a plain slick look to
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the front of the box versus well we see back sort of more like the traditional
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style on the back of the box where it's sort of marketing bullet points on every
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square cm of the packaging so the front
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very clean very nice so let's see what they still consider worthwhile to call
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out on the front in spite of the dramatically reduced amount of text so
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this is the x79 ud5 which is an x79
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board and is sort of an upper upper to Mid tier board based on that they
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usually have a UD something below that and usually a UD something above the
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five patent pending 3D power three-way
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digital engine so digital CPU power as well as digital memory power time two
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interesting they also have their patent pending 3D BIOS so the 3D BIOS uh and
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the 3D power utility are available for download and what this means is it's a
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very unique way and I haven't seen it in person yet so I can't tell you too much
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about it but it's a unique way that Gigabyte has implemented their ufi bio
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so with previous Gigabyte boards there's z68 boards their p67 boards they've had
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UEFI features like support for 3 terb plus hard drives but they haven't really
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looked like a graphical like a gooey
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BIOS like the ASUS ones and the MSI ones have well now they have a fully
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graphical BIOS and I am really looking forward to checking it out let's see
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what else they have to say for themselves so yeah this is an x79 board which means full support for Intel core
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i7s on the LGA 2011 platform PCI Express
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Gen 3 is dependent on CPU and expansion car compatibility but it is designed for
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PCIe Gen 3 which means the switching is all correct for channel DDR3 you can
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install up to eight dims so that's up to 64 gigs of memory with the dims that are
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available today with a Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi card included
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on the back we find a whole lot more of Gigabyte whatnot so three-way digital
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engine means digital memory digital CPU and digital memory so A and B mean
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that's um that's uh the
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sorry so this is quad Channel memory which means there are four channels and
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then you can put up to two dims in each channel so this is going to probably be
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doing one of the dims in each Channel
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and this will be doing one of the dims in each of the other channels so that
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way you have completely different Power delivery for each of the channels
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although it's possible that they've done it for the banks on either side of the
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memory controller due to the differences and interference for these Banks and
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these Banks I'm not sure which way they've done it either way it means very Advanced power management on the
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motherboard for your memory 3D power so this is to do with turbo voltage
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response you can maintain optimal voltage with loadline calibration and
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realtime pwm frequency switching so these are all features that are possible
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with a digital pwm 3D power utility users can now enjoy a fully interactive
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3D utility that facilitates adjustment of the three dimensions that control the
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power delivery to your CPU and memory and voltage phase and frequency these
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parameters are crucial okay 3D BIOS so this shows the board here I my
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understanding is you can actually highlight certain sections of the board and be taken to the pertinent settings
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for those sections so that's a very different way of doing things for sure
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we see traditional Gigabyte features like dual BIOS with a switch allowing
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you to pick between which one you want to boot from it also gives you a fail
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safe in case something happens and it gets corrupted onboard power OC and
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reset buttons up to eight slots for maximum capacity got it and Ultra
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durable 3 which is their two times Coster copper PCB and high quality
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components so let's get the actual board opened up I'm sorry that took so long
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but here we go that is a very nice
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looking board Gigabyte with their LGA um
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1155 processors really took a major step
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forward in terms of their board Aesthetics and now I'm seeing something actually
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kind of new and that they're also taking a major step forward with their
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accessory Aesthetics I remember seeing black PCB 3-way SLI ready boards that
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came with these blue SLI Bridges check
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this out matte black SLI Bridge there
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you go that is how it is done so what
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else we got in terms of accessories here we have a flexible 2-way SLI Bridge we
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have a flexible black Crossfire Bridge
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all of those are looking fine looking good we have a some kind of a cable for
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plugging in something we'll find out what that's for later got a couple
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antennas okay we have a front USB 3
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brushed metal sort of looking it's probably brushed plastic but it looks
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pretty good and then that's your uh internal header for USB 3 here aha this
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is the uh the Bluetooth and what else is
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on this thing I think it was a sticker on the front they excited to include
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this so this is a Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi
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card very cool let's open this up so
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those two antennas are for this guy so there's the Bluetooth one and the Wi-Fi
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antennas and then uh let's see those are both hooked into the same module here
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looks like there's a USB port on the back here or you can plug it in by front
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USB which must be what that Cable's for there we go so this allows you to plug
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it into the USB header on your motherboard and then you can have
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Bluetooth and Wi-Fi cool all right we got a user manual
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including your driver's disc you should download the latest off the Gigabyte
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website all that good stuff GC Wi-Fi
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installation guide so here they're going to show you how to do it all right so
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you plug the thing into the thing and then plug the other things into the
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other thing and it's pretty straightforward pretty much what I already explained okay what else we got
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multilingual installation guide book Gigabyte sticker to be home theater
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sticker uh we got 1 2 3 four SATA cables
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uh two are right angle and two are straight to straight and finally an IO
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shield and then now see I lied before
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I'm sorry you guys now the board itself
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I'm just sort of going to make some room here make this a
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platform and here we go so this is an LGA 2011 board which means full support
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for as I said before core i7 core i7
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extreme processors on the 2011 socket as
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well as all the goodies that go along with it so so that starts with the quad
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Channel memory controller so you would install banks in one two over here three
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and four four channels of memory and then if you wanted to have eight dims
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then you would afterwards populate the black ones the reason I would populate
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the gray ones first is cuz you can see each of the closest gray ones is
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slightly further away from the socket than the closest black ones which means
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that you can install larger CPU coolers without interfering with your RAM good
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thinking Gigabyte we appreciate those little details very very much speaking
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of little details the 8 Pin power connector is at the top left of the
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board in its exact right correct location where I like to see it and
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moving over we've got our power delivery system so as with all x79 boards this is
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packed into a very cramped space and I would definitely recommend throwing some
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active cooling whether it's uh incidental air flow from your CPU Cooler
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or whether you got a fan in your case above the board here in order to make
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sure that that's getting enough cooling the power switch is in an intelligent
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location up at the top right because a lot of the times you see them on the
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very bottoms of the boards and as soon as you install a couple graphics cards
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you know here and here they're covered and you can't access them anyway so our
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24 pins in its correct location along the right hand Edge we've got our front
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USB 3 header and what I'm going to start calling the correct location along the
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right hand Edge because that's where things plug into the front we've got 10
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uh SATA ports of some sort or another so
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these guys are SATA 3 6 GB second these are SATA 2 3 GB per second and these
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four are SATA 3 6 GB per second as well
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so we've got a nice little heat sink on our chipset there we've got our reset
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switch we've got our front panel headers clear seos jumper as well as our dual
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biosis right here moving over we've got our powered or like super powered USB
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port for charging things like iPads and other tablets uh we've got two more
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front USB 2.0 ports we have fire wire in
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case anyone still using is that we've got our front audio and now let's have a
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look at the PCIe slot layout so we've only got six PCI slots which means that
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uh I mean I mean look at look at how much space they would have had to put a
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seventh one up there with these memory slots right here there's just not a lot
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of space on these x79 boards so a lot of guys are putting six slots on so the one
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here is PCIe 16x this one here is also
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wired for 16x and this guy's wired for 8X which means you're going to run 16x
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16x for dual cards or eight or 16 88 for
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triple cards we've also got two PCI e1x
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slots and one Legacy PCI slot in case you still uh need you know like an old
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Wi-Fi card or sound card or whatever the case may be let's go ahead and have a
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look at the back of the board where we find oh cool look at that you can select
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which uh BIOS you're going to use with a button on the back that's outstanding
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you can also clear the seimos here and you have your One Touch over clocking
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button here this is this is actually a great inclusion to have on the back of
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the board this is one of the most multicolored back panels I think I've seen in quite a while and we're back to
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the like check check this out this looks great you got like black and gray and
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like gunmetal and blue you know a couple
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blue accents and then here it's like back to the circus which is what
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Gigabyte motherboards used to used to kind of look like all over them but I
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don't mind it on the back as long as the color coding sort of makes sense so we
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got our PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports we got one two three four five
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six seven eight USB 2.0 ports we have an
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ESAT Port so that's a USB 2.0 as well as an ESAT Port we have a straight eata
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Port so that's 2 e sat we have two USB 3.0 fire wire gigabit Ethernet and
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finally 7.1 audio out including an optical audio out so thank you for
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checking out my unboxing and first look at the G x79 ud5 don't forget the
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supports all the latest goodies including Crossfire SLI socket 2011 quad
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Channel memory PCI Express 3.0 and even
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Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi and all of that
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is completely out of the box