GIGABYTE is adding full Ivy Bridge support with PCI-E 3.0 as well as BIOS that supports the 22nm shrink of Sandy Bridge, I guess we can call this board a third generation Sandy Bridge motherboard. This board is loaded with Creative 20K2 audio with high quality Nichicon capacitors with audio amplifiers as well as Bigfoot Killer E2100 Gaming NIC.  12 Phase VRM (8+2+2)

PCI-E 3.0 slots in this order: 1x,16x,1x,8x and the board has 5 x SATA 3GB/s and 4 x SATA 6GB/s

Triple slot pacing and two PCI slots.

Back Panel:

• 7.1 Audio Out
• 2 x USB 3.0
• 7 x USB 2.0
• 1 x eSATA/USB 2.0 port
• PS/2 Keyboard or Mouse
• OC button
• HDMI Port for QuickSync

The board's features as a whole are pretty similar to previous gen, except they have moved the layout to better suit the board. For instance I had an issue with my X58 Assassin, when I wanted to do SLI with two cards the second card would sit right on top of the front panel OC button connector, thanks sinhardware.

Here are some photo's, click the thumbnails