14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has yet to release all the Ivy Bridge central processing units and, likewise, it hasn't launched all accompanying chipsets, so people can expect various motherboard announcements starting a week from now.
The chipset we are looking at is called Q77 and will be released in official capacity, by Intel, in about a week and a half.
ASRock didn't want to wait that long though, so it stepped up and introduced the Q77M vPro motherboard.
The company has, thus, become the first to announce and start selling a Q77 platform.
Keep in mind that the price is pretty steep though: $125, or 97.74 Euro. Unjustifiably so, in fact. One would be better off getting the $90 / 70 Euro H77 Pro4-M, although this one lacks the Q77M vPro's a DisplayPort and the Intel SBA software.
And now we've finally reached the point where we provide the specs of this Q77M vPro motherboard.
With the microATX form factor, it gets four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, two SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors and headers for four USB 2.0 ports.
A front USB 3.0 header exists as well, as do a TPM module, a parallel port and a serial port.
The typical feature set goes on with a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot and a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot (four lanes of bandwidth), plus two legacy PCI slots.
Furthermore, the back panel offers six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 connectors, Gigabit LAN, 5.1-channel audio, DVI, D-Sub and DisplayPort (instead of the more consumer-fitting HDMI).
ASRock is shipping the Q77M vPro in a bundle with Intel's aforementioned SBA software (Small Business Advantage), which monitors installed programs, finds updates, makes backups, restores applications in case of failure and blocks USB devices that aren't authorized. A power saving feature and a “PC Health Center” (keeps the system in tip-top shape during non-working hours) are part of the suite as well.
