The Layout -
The layout of any motherboard is important. Even simple mistakes in component placement or the signal traces can cause major issued in performance and stability. With the ATX form factor we find that this is even truer; the devices we drop onto them demand more and cleaner power while the signal speeds push faster and faster. The GA-X78-UD5 is the typical ATX layout and is fairly typical as far as the layout for an X79 motherboard. Unlike the G1.Assassin 2 the X79-UD5 has the full eight slots for memory. This could mean a couple of things, on the one side it could mean slower top-end memory performance or it could simply mean that Gigabyte had more time to get the training layout down (and they also did not have to worry about an complete audio card on the board.

The cooling on the board was much smaller than I would have thought and does make us wonder if we are going to be able to hit the same clocks as we did with the G1.Assassin2. The rest of the board is fairly typical with three PCIe x16 mechanical slots (only two are fully x16 electrical) and even a PCI 2.0 slot for those legacy devices.
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