14 DAY TRIAL // With one month to go until the official release of the Intel 7-series chipset family, a Chinese online store has listed Asus’ upcoming P8Z77-V Deluxe motherboard for Ivy Bridge processors with pricing being set at 2,499 RMB ($396 US).
The motherboard is based on Intel’s Z77 chipset, which is the most advanced controller available in the 7-series PCH family.
Designed to be compatible with both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors the Asus board comes fitted with a Digi+ VRM, DDR3-2800MHz overclocking support, EPU, and a TurboV Processing Unit (TPU).
The board’s expansion features include two PCI Express x16 slots Gen 3.0, one PCIe x16 Gen 2.0 slot (x4 electrical), four PCIe x1 slots, as well as eight SATA ports, TechPowerUp reveals.
Four of these support SATA 6Gbps transfer speeds, two driven by the Intel Z77 chipset, while the other two are controlled by a third-party controller.
As far as the PCIe x16 slots are concerned, only the first of these can work at full x16 speeds as the second one has only eight PCIe lanes routed to it, but SLI or CrossFireX multi-GPU technologies are both supported.
Moving to the back, the connectivity options available include everything that we expect to see from a high-end Z77 board, such as HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces (one driven by Intel 82579V, one by Realtek RTL8111F PHY), wireless b/g/n (quad-band), Bluetooth 3.0, as well as a pair of eSATA 6Gbps ports.
Asus has also added eight USB 3.0 ports, six installed on the rear I/O header, while the remaining two can be routed to the front of the case by connecting them to the provided on-board header.
The Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe is expected to be officially announced on April 8, when rumors indicate that Intel plans to introduce its new 7-series chipsets.