Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H Ivy Bridge SLI Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,110 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of yet another z77 board this one took me a little bit
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longer sorry about that but here we are this is the
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z77x ud3h gigabytes whole uh slogan for
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this is insist on Ultra durable so they mean a new version of ultra durable
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Ultra durable has been through a number of revisions so it started with the two
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times copper PCB which is better for heat dissipation as well as for
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performance and it's now up to ultra durable 4 which includes high
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temperature protection humidity protection with their new glass fabric
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PCB which apparently allows it to be
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more resistant to humidity and moisture uh next is their electrostatic
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protection as well as power failure protection so that is ultra durable
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according to Gigabyte and they want you to insist on an ultra durable
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motherboard for your new pc we also see a couple other Focus things here that is
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their patent pending 3D power All Digital engines so that means all
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aspects of your CPU and memory are being powered digitally so that is your
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onboard GPU your uncore your core your
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memory all of that good stuff very cool as well as their 3D bio so what they
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mean by 3D BIOS is dual ufi BIOS uh that
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is graphical interface BIOS that has um kind of a unique interface I
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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
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picture of a motherboard and you just click on the SATA ports if you want to
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change something about your boot order or whatever and it's it's very graphical
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so if you want to change something about your CPU or memory you click on the CPU
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socket it gives you all the relevant options in one place so this is a an LG
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1155 board with the z77 chipset which means we've got support for all that
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cool z77 stuff including PCI Express gen
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3 as well as Intel's Intel's uh onboard
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USB 3 Port so that is the front ports and two rear ports are going to be
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powered by the Intel chipset we've got virtue MVP which is an upgraded version
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of lucid virt which allows you to use the onboard GPU that's built into the
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CPU to do things like transcoding video which is very very fast compared to the
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traditional methods but still take advantage of a dedicated graphics card
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for 3D games Crossfire and SLI are both
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supported as well as the MSA onboard connector but I'll show you more about
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that in just a moment so all digital power there you go see CPU Graphics
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memory and VT and what else we got load
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line calibration okay most modern boards that are somewhat decent for
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overclocking do have load line calibration this is a good one smart
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response so Gigabyte has a much easier way than their competitors of setting up
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smart response it's basically like two clicks on a little application that you
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download it's really really simple to set up remember smart response allows
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you to take up to a 60 gig SSD and use it as a cache for your boot hard drive
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or any other hard drive I guess although I'm not convinced that it makes much
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sense to use it on something that's not a boot Drive unless maybe you you play
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like MMOs or whatever you have your MMO installed on a separate drive and then
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uh that way smart response will make sure that you've got all of the most
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relevant things that you use most frequently cached into the SSD so okay I
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guess I could kind of see that most games don't benefit much from an SSD in
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terms of uh of loading times though so just something to be aware of I would
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usually use Smart response for the boot Drive Right accessories
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four SATA cables two of them are right angle two of them are not right angle
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we've got a flexible black SLI Bridge exactly the right kind we have an IO
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Shield a multilingual installation guide book and a user's manual including a DVD
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with utilities and drivers which you shouldn't use and you should download the latest off the Gigabyte website here
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is the board itself Gigabyte does such a good job of their board Aesthetics these
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days we've got just a nice slick black
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white and blue color scheme don't worry
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these are stickers these are stickers this isn't a sticker this is my one
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complaint actually about the x79 board that I'm using in my system right now it
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looks so Sleek except for bam orange
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light red button so what I'm probably going to do on on that board is just
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paint over it in black nail polish or something like that and uh it'll be all
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good so there's the LG 1155 socket supporting Second Generation and third
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generation Intel core processors code name Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge uh as
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well as our power delivery with kind of a neat looking little heat sinky thing
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going on with got like an arrow going on in the middle and some wavy looking kind
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of things uh the the TDP of the CPUs
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that go in here is 77 Watts for Ivy
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Bridge or 95 Watts for Sandy Bridge so we don't need a ton of power delivery
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we've got an eight pin power connector anyway and it's in its ideal location up
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at the top left of the board speaking of Ideal locations I'm personally a big fan
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of having the power button up here as opposed to down here the onboard power
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button the reason for that is that this is easier to reach when you have a couple graphics cards installed which
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sometimes I do we've also got our simos switch Button as well as our reset
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switch uh SOS SOS switch I think they mean SOS
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clear switch at least I hope that's what they mean there's another clear seos down
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here you know what give me a moment here guys I'm going to try and figure this out so this is fairly straightforward
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that is the seos clear switch this guy right here switches you between the main
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BIOS and the backup BIOS so that's more of like a SEO or um like a BIOS
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chip switch and then this one these two jumpers right here are a clear seos
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jumper as well so you've got a multitude of different ways to manage the BIOS or
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the ufi I should probably sto calling it a BIOS it's not really called that
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anymore of this motherboard your 24 pin connectors and its ideal location along
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the right-handed Edge and you've got another auxiliary connector here so that's kind of interesting uh someone
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actually messaged me not that long ago saying that their friend had
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misunderstood uh when I was talking about one of these these connectors on
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the x58 OC board from Gigabyte um and
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had thought that he could plug his hard drive into it that's not how it works
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this is auxiliary power for the motherboard using a SATA power connector
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from your power supply so it's if you have multiple graphics cards installed
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just for additional stability I can't imagine you'd need it on this board but
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it's there if you want it uh we've got two SATA 36 GB per second ports powered
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by the Intel chipset as well as four SATA 2 3 GB per second ports please note
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SATA port 5 that is uh they're numbered zero to five so the last one is going to
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be disabled if you plug something into the M SATA slot here so M SATA as a
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standard that's used for ssds particularly useful if you want to run
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Intel smart response technology without actually plugging in SSD into a bay in
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your case you can just clip it in right there it's just running at SATA 2 3 GB
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per second mode we have a post debug LED which has all the codes uh outlined in
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the manual we have our front panel connectors for your power and your reset
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and all that good stuff front panel USB 2 I couldn't help noticing the absence
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of one of their uh supercharging USB ports so that's uh
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that's kind of interesting I guess that's a feature this board doesn't have
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that the higher end board does have a very useful one indeed it does have
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onoff charge though which means that you can charge your devices even when the system is powered off we've also got a
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front panel audio header and it's ideal location at the bottom left of the board
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and in terms of PCI Express slot layout we have something that actually looks
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pretty good so if you have a low-end system that is to say One graphics card
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your PCI slot will be accessible which stands to reason whereas if you do a
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high-end configuration with dual PCIe graphics cards it will cover that PCI
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slot so they kind of aim it towards the higher end of build you go for on this
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the fewer Legacy PCI slots will be available which kind of makes sense so
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if you do install dual graphics cards you're going to be left with one two PCI
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e1x as well as a PCI e8x a
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PCIe or sorry and a and a PCIe 4X so if
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you're run in SLI or Crossfire these two are going to run in 8X 8X mode but
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remember that's PCIe gen 3 with an ivybridge CPU which means that the
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bandwidth is equivalent to PCIe Gen 2 16x I forgot to mention earlier that uh
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DDR3 dual channel is supported up to four dims and remember guys ivybridge
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CPUs will also unlock a plethora of ha I think that's the first time I've used
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that word on Tech tips of uh new memory speeds that were not available on Sandy
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Bridge CPUs now at the back of the board we find a few interesting things so one
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of them is a PS2 keyboard mouse combo Port still like to see those 1 2 3 4 5
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six USB 3.0 ports these two of them are running off the Intel chipset and four
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of them are not now I have a concern about the fact that this board doesn't
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have any USB 2 ports because from time to time usb3 drivers um are not going to
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be automatically installed by your OS which means that if you're operating all
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of your peripherals based on the back panel ports and you haven't installed
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the driver for those ports yet your
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keyboard and mouse might not work so I would definitely recommend if you have
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one of these boards and you're having trouble with it just use one of your
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front headers plug into your front USB 2 in order to get up and running and then
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install all your drivers and then these should all work just fine we've also got
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VGA DVI HDMI and DisplayPort out options remember with ivybridge you can
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support up to three displays out at a time even on onboard Graphics optical
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audio out dual eSATA uh gigabit Ethernet
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as well as 7.1 analog audio out round
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out the I/O options on this board nice
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little touches Matt Black PCB using proper screws to attach all of the
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coolers on this board in spite of the fact that it is a ud3 level board so
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this is not a premium level board another nice touch is the fact that they
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have included SLI support even though this is a more value segmented board as
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well as oh yeah there's the front USB 3 which I don't think I ever showed you so
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uh finally last but not least we have one two three
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four five wow that's actually not bad five four pin pwm fan headers and don't
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