The Motherboard

Looking at the board, you could instantly tell it's part of the UD7 series with that all black PCB and that great looking heatsink setup that has those gold accents on it which make the board look great. You can get a pretty good idea of the board itself, but let's move in closer to see what exactly we're dealing with today.

Apart from a single legacy PCI slot, we've got six PCI-E x16 slots which is just huge. Of course, not all of them run at x16, so let's take a closer look. We've got two slots that run at x16, two that run at x8 and two that run at x4.

If you're using one card, you'll use the top most slot which is x16. If you're going for two cards, you'll use the top slot and the fifth slot and then both your cards will run at x16. If you're going down the path of three cards, you'll use the two slots we just mentioned along with the third slot; that means you'll have a x16 / x8 / x8 setup. If you throw a fourth card into the mix, you'll put that in the most bottom slot and that will mean all your cards will be running at x8.

Of course, you can put x4 and x1 devices in the x16 slots and they will just run at the appropriate speed. If you go down the path of four video cards, it won't be an option and if you go three cards you'll be limited, but still have some options as GIGABYTE have just offered us so many PCI-Express slots.

Moving away from the PCI-E slots, we can check out the bottom of the motherboard and see all the headers that are on offer. We've got our front Audio, 1394 FireWire, three USB 3.0 headers, USB 3.0 header and our main system header.

Moving around the corner, we can see our Debug LED and next to that we have eight SATA ports. All eight ports are SATA III, but the six black ones run off the AMD SB950 South Bridge. As for the two grey ones, they run off the Marvel 88SE9172 controller.

Next to these SATA ports you can also see a SATA power connector. This works the same as the Molex or PCI-E power connectors we've seen on high end boards in the past. If you're opting for a multiple VGA setup, it's recommend that you plug a SATA power cable into this position to make sure everything runs nice and stable.