The Motherboard

Moving onto the board, we can see that the design is just what you'd expect from the UD5 named motherboard. We've got the black PCB which looks great along with the little highlights of blue throughout the board that as always lets us know it's part of the UD5 family. You can see the black color scheme goes throughout the whole board and it's nice to see there aren't some random colors thrown in for the slots.

Moving in closer, we've got a legacy PCI slot, single PCIe x1 slot and five PCIe x16 slots. Starting from the left, the PCIe x16 configuration is x16 / x4 / x16 / x4 / x8. The board supports three-card CrossFireX and SLI, so in that configuration the setup would be x16 / x16 / x8. Considering the price point of the board, that's pretty awesome. Along with that you still have the PCIe 1x slot if you have any devices that make use of that connection.

Moving to the bottom of the board, we've got our front audio header on the left followed by a FireWire header, three USB 2.0 headers, a single USB 3.0 header, TPM and our Front Panel header which is of course color coded. The UD5 doesn't come with a power / reset button like the higher up UD7; for most this won't matter.

Turning the corner, you can see we've got a total of eight SATA ports here. The six black ones are all SATA III and run off the AMD SB950 South bridge; the two grey ones that sit just to the side are also SATA III, but they run off the Marvell 88SE9172 controller.