Gigabyte X79-UD7 SLI Gaming Overclocking Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,145 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of gigabytes at this time highest end motherboard for
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the x79 platform this is the ud7 this is
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part of sort of part of their oc series so in terms of color scheme in terms of
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robustness this is more of a continuation of the x58 oc than the x58
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ud7 series boards it uses their new 3d
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BIOS which shows you an image of the board and you click on the various parts
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of the board in order to configure things that are to do with those it has
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3d power which is not three-dimensional but rather three-way digital power so
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that is separate power delivery systems for the CPU as well as the two different
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memory zones it supports the latest Intel core i7 and core i7 extreme
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processors on the x79 socket 20 lga 2011
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platform it supports pci express gen 3 asterix asterix depends on the blah blah
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expansion and CPU basically it will in the future 4
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channel ddr3 is supported and it comes with a little bluetooth 4.0 and wi-fi
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module included which also happens to work on other motherboards if you buy
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this board and you happen to have another system that needs wi-fi you can throw it in there they haven't locked
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you out the way that some of their competitors do with those little add-on
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cards so thumbs up Gigabyte thank you for that adding more value all right go
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see dual BIOS you can use the bioselector button on the back panel in
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order to pick which BIOS you want to use at any given time oc keg allows provides
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two additional onboard SATA power connectors that provide more stable PCIe
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power in three-way and four-way configurations and also prevent
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connector burn on the 24 pin i'm a big fan of using SATA power connectors for
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those because most modern power supplies have a ton of those and not uh too many
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molex connectors especially in you know a modular setup where you basically be
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plugging in like a four four connector molex power plug just to plug into that
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one thing so that's awesome okay we have as many on board buttons as i've pretty
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much seen so far so you can onboard adjust the base clock which i generally
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wouldn't recommend doing onboard adjust the CPU multiplier as
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well as change gears so you can either adjust in 0.1 megahertz frequen uh steps
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or one megahertz steps depending on the gear you're in you've also got your
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onboard power and your onboard reset switch let's go ahead and get this baby
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opened up you guys are going to discover
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that contrary to what i thought and what i
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thought was that the Gigabyte g1 assassin 2
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was going to be the highest end Gigabyte motherboard on the x79 platform you are
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going to find out that it is rather the ud7 that is the highest end Gigabyte
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motherboard on the x79 platform so
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there's the board itself looks baus if i may say so and here are all the
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included accessories which are many so we have a front panel usb 3
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three and a half inch okay we have oh nice we've got one of those
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handy dandy they used to include these with a lot of their boards now it looks like only on the very high end so this
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is awesome you got two e-status you got one molex power and then it comes with
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an adapter from one molex to two SATA power so you can just throw bear drives
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on there and these are like the most handy cables in the world these are
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esata to SATA so this is a way to easily
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plug a couple bear drives into the back of your system and transfer data or do
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whatever else you need to do very very handy it doesn't sound that useful but
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it really really is okay we've got a usb cable to power up
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and transfer data to this guy right here so this is our PCIe 1x uh
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bluetooth and wireless n adapter which
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also includes a couple of antennas right about there we've got a Gigabyte
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three-way sli bridge a Gigabyte four-way
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sli bridge oh which is finally black check that out black Gigabyte sli
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bridges love it love it we have a Gigabyte two-way sli bridge
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nice flexible connector there and then finally we have a Gigabyte long
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crossfire bridge as well as an io shield lots of accessories look at this color
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coded for your satisfaction and happiness as well as a Gigabyte sticker a Gigabyte
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manual and oh another Gigabyte oh dolby sticker and
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finally a utility dvd and
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wireless card driver cd or dvd dvd
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which you don't need because you can download the latest off the Gigabyte
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website so i'm gonna go ahead and put these back in here i'm gonna put that
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back in there i'm gonna put this back in here i'm gonna take this out of here
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i'm gonna unbox this here i'm uh
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see ya look at that hot glue trail fascinating i wonder what they glued to
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the motherboard maybe it was slick
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no he says no i think he's probably just trolling me
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i'm gonna put random stuff on whatever Linus is gonna unbox just to throw him
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off the scent okay here we go what do we got
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let's start with the overall layout of this board so this is an xl that is to
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say extra large atx motherboard it has
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seven expansion slots which is something that is very very difficult to do on a
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regular atx 79 board for a couple of reasons one is the extremely large CPU
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socket the other is the extremely large and robust power delivery systems that
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typically exist on these boards due to the power hungry cpus that go in them
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and the other is the fact that the memory now goes on either side of the
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socket as per the Intel recommended design which gives you less room for
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slots up here and more room for needing
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to put slots down here so let's start with this socket right here we've got
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a pretty beefy looking power delivery system with a pretty
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decent looking cooler although the same feedback that i gave with all my other
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x79 board unboxings remains for this one you are going to want to make sure you
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get some decent cooling on the pwm heatsink right here so if you have a
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case that for example has a top fan you're going to have it blow directly
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down onto this heatsink so that it's bringing in nice fresh air to keep that
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cool keep it from running into any trouble the same thing goes for the back
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of the board so your your standoffs are going to go
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right here and you'll have a little bit of a gap so if you do have a top fan in your case and you get a little bit of
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airflow over these guys it could not hurt matters okay we've got dual 8-pin
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CPU power connectors right here in their ideal location at the top left we've got
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all of our onboard switches in their ideal locations up here at the top right
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i say ideal location because rather than having them down here where they're
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inaccessible with a graphics card plugged in here i prefer to have them up
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in this corner where i can actually reach them no matter what the situation
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we also have a rece okay so reset so you know what i covered all this when we did
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the box but we've also got all the v check points that we could possibly want
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along this edge of the board right here so i'll let you guys have a look if you care you can pause the video and you can
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see them all i'm not going to read them all out on the right hand edge we've got
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the 24 pin power connector in its ideal location we have a post led readout
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we've also got our auxiliary power connector so there's the one SATA power
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connector there there's the other state of power connector right down there and
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in terms of SATA data connectors we have SATA three six gigabit per second right
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here two ports four zeta two three gigabit per second and then four
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additional Gigabyte SATA three six gigabit per second so those are running
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off of a third-party chipset the cooler right here is pretty sporty looking i'd
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say it so it has a heat pipe that runs up to that pwm cooler the whole thing
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looks pretty slick personally i'm a big fan of green and orange and yellow and
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like brightly colored but tastefully brightly colored motherboard so not like
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the old Gigabyte of old we're talking the new Gigabyte with the matte black
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pcb the bright orange and then everything else pretty much black or
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matte black or gray looks great front panel connectors powered usb so like
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uber powered usb for charging your tablet with your system we've also got
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two more usb 2.0 front panel headers our front panel audio connector header
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delay then what else we got here so one two three four five six seven right i
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already covered that these support sli or crossfire in a two-way configuration
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right about here okay 16x16x if you want to run four-way
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cards you're looking at one two three four times 8x so this is 8x pcie2 or
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PCIe 3.0 CPU support dependent okay we've got
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three PCIe 1x connectors so if you plug
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in two dual slot graphics cards you're going to be left with an 8x an 8x and a
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1x bearing in mind if you populate these it'll reduce the bandwidth available in
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these okay moving on you know what let's cover the locations of all of our fan
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fan headers because it looks like we got a lot on this board we got one four pin
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pwm here one four pin pwm here
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one here that's three so far we have
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two more here that's five so far six seven
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ah uh uh seven pwm connectors all right
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on the back of the board we have a variety of different things we have the
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ps2 keyboard mouse combo port that i'm a big fan of still seeing on boards one
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two three four five six seven eight usb 2.0 ports the cmos
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selector or the rather the BIOS chip selector button so you can
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choose which BIOS chip you want to boot from clear cmos button oc button that is
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one touch overclocking so we've tried this with the uh
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3630 is that what it's called 39 30
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something hold on i'll be back in a moment sorry 39 30 and we hit 4 gigahertz just
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by pressing the button and it was stable usb 3.0 x 2 gigabit Ethernet and 7.1
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audio out including an optical audio out
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and i think that pretty much covers it i have sort of changed my mind actually i
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wanted to hold it up to it and sort of visualize a little bit but i was going
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to use the assassin 2 to update our extreme buyer's guide system with the
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x79 platform but based on that i think that looks pretty
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good the green and the orange based on that i like this i think we're
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actually going to go with the x79 ud7
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instead now one thing that's been kind of bugging me is i think this excel atx
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motherboard is actually not quite as long as the assassin 2. this looks like
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only eight pci slots rather than nine remember guys xlatx is
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kind of a flexible standard in that
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some xlatx boards are eight slots long like this one and some of
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them are nine so what that means is that you can install this in a much wider
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variety of cases than the assassin 2 was capable of being installed in so many
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lien lee cases yeah that's awesome actually good job
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Gigabyte so thanks for checking out my unboxing of the x79 ud-7 don't forget to
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