Introduction

It's been a massive year for me at TweakTown as I've seen my categories expand into the Motherboard and CPU area. And it fits so gloriously against the Video Card section I've managed for years. 224 Reviews later, though, and this wraps up my final piece for the year.

The X79-UD5 from GIGABYTE also marks the last of our X79 boards that we received at launch, bringing the total to 12 X79 motherboards since the launch of the new high end chipset from Intel. We've got more boards on the way, but they'll be slightly delayed. For now we'll be finishing our massive X79 motherboard run with the X79-UD5.

There's not much more that really needs to be said; we should all be pretty comfortable when it comes to knowing the new chipset from Intel, so let's just get stuck into the package of the board. Once we've done that we'll move onto the motherboard itself, jump into the fancy new 3D BIOS that GIGABYTE are using before we cover the overclocking side of things alongside the performance of course.

So with everything said and done, let's get ready to just get into it and see what GIGABYTE bring to the table with the brand new X79-UD5 with its awesome blue color scheme that we've grown to love.

The Package

Argh! White boxes. I hate white boxes, only because they're such a pain to take photos of against a white background. Still, the new box design looks nice and fresh. You can see going over it we've got a heap of detail in regards to the features, especially turning over where we have a picture of the board itself.

Moving inside the box, we've got the normal line up of paperwork, couple of driver CDs, four SATA cables, I/O back plate along with two SLI connectors. One's a simple dual one, while the other is a 3-Way one and an extended CrossFire bridge.

Along with that, we've also got the new WiFi card from GIGABYTE which brings not only WiFi, but support for Bluetooth 4.0, a technology that is being integrated on newer phones these days. Along with that we've also got a couple of antennas to help increase the range.

Finally, we finish up with a USB 3.0 header that can be installed in the front of your case to give you two more USB 3.0 ports.