CES 2012: ECS’ Intel Z77 Ivy Bridge Motherboard Also Shows Up

With a little less than three months to go until Intel launches its Ivy Bridge processors, motherboard makers have started showcasing their solutions for these upcoming CPUs, ECS just presenting the Z77H2-AX Black Deluxe board during CES 2012.

The motherboard takes a lot of its design cues from the company’s existing Black Series modes, but his time it comes with Intel’s upcoming Z77 Panther Point chipset.

The PCH is cooled by what seems to be a low-profile aluminum heatspreder, and right above it ECS has placed three PCI Express x16 slots, which are driven by the 16 lane PCIe controller integrated inside Ivy Bridge processors.

This setup is compatible with 2-way Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFireX configurations, but the slots will drop in x8 mode in order to enable this.

As Legit Review revealed, the rest of the expansion options include a pair of PCIe x1 slots, two 32-bit legacy PCI slots, four SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps ports, as well as an mSATA connector probably for installing an SSD caching drive. 

Moving to the back of the motherboard, we see than the Z77H2-AX Black Edition comes fitted with both WiFi and Bluetooth as well as with a Clear CMOS button and an HDMI port.

In addition, users also get four USB 3.0 ports (driven by the Intel Z77 chipset) and 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out, while two additional USB 3.0 ports are available through an on-board header. 

Two eSATA ports and an Ethernet jack round up the connectivity list, while the now standard Power and Reset on-board buttons were also added to the ECS Z77H2-AX Black Extreme.

No information regarding pricing or availability was made public by ECS, but more details should be unveiled as we get nearer to the launch of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors.