The Box, The Accessories, The Board
The box is your standard Gigabyte motherboard box. Every inch on the box is jampacked with some sort of advertising or a logo of some feature on the board. Diving into the box you get your standard set of features. A motherboard backplate, SATA cables, a manual , driver disk , and a sticker round out the included accessories. If you were looking for a sign to hang on your door to inform others you are gaming, or a poster to show how much of a l33t nerd you are it might be a good idea to look elsewhere. Gigabyte has a non-nonsense attitude with their motherboards and I have to say I like it.
Moving onto the motherboard the first thing I really notice is the lack of anything that really jumps out at me in terms of its physical looks. Since the board goes with a black PCB, with blue and silver branding the board will go perfectly with one of the many all-black cases out there on the market. The voltage read points and LED debug board are a nice touch that have become a commonplace with Gigabyte boards as of late and is much appreciated.
Looking at the layout of the board it is quite clean. The area around the CPU socket is quite clean which will appeal to those who need to insulate the socket area for overclocking. Since this board features the new Ultra-Durable 4 technology this board is built to be more reliable and last longer than any previous Gigabyte motherboards.
Eight SATA ports should keep pretty much everyone except the most hardcore storage addicts happy. Three full-sized PCIE slots only allow three-way SLI or Crossfire so if you were looking for four-way you will have to go with another motherboard.
If you were looking for ports this board has a few of them. Six USB ports on the rear panel give a nice amount of connectivity for peripherals. A DVI port, HDMI , Display port and a VGA port. Personally, I would prefer it if Gigabyte cut out the DVI and VGA ports and instead included two more USB ports since it would be very easy to include HDMI or DP to VGA or DVI adapters.
The VRM area of the board offers up a huge amount of power for all sorts of overclocking from your basic daily overclocks to extreme liquid nitrogen overclocking there is more than enough power to go around. Even though the whole board isn’t covered in power phases there is still more than enough power for any kind of use that you could dream up.
