14 DAY TRIAL // Asus is one of the companies that will most certainly introduce an important number of Intel Z68 motherboard models when the chipset becomes available on May 11, and one of these solutions will be the P8Z68-V Pro which was just pictured in detail on a Chinese website.
Judging by its name and feature list, the motherboard should target high-end users, although it won't certainly come as Asus' flagship Z68 solution.
The board layout is pretty standard when compared to the company's recent LGA 1155 solutions and is powered by what seems to be a 16-phase PWM design with Digi+ VRMs.
These are cooled by two separate blue heatsinks which leave quite enough room around the CPU socket for installing oversized coolers.
As far as the expansion slots available are concerned, the card features four DIMM sockets, two PCI Express x1 slots, two legacy PCI slots, as well as three PCI Express x16 slots.
When the first two x16 slots are populated, they work in an x8 mode, while the third slot has only four PCI Express lanes worth of bandwidth available.
Storage is provided by four SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps ports driven by the Z67 PCH, seconded by two additional SATA 6Gbps connectors driven by a Marvell controller.
Moving to the back of the P8Z68-V Pro, we see that Asus has decided to drop the legacy PS/2 port and that the motherboard now features six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, an eSATA port, D-sub, DVI and HDMI video outputs, a Gigabit Ethernet connector, 7.1-channel audio jacks, an optical S/PDIF out and a Bluetooth module.
An ASMedia host controller provides support for two additional USB 3.0 ports via an on-board header.
The Asus P8Z68-V Pro is expected to launch on May 11 together with Intel's Z68 chipset, but no details about the motherboard's price are available at this time.
