14 DAY TRIAL // Like most other motherboard manufacturers, Biostar is also preparing for the launch of the Intel Ivy Bridge processors and one of the company's LGA 1155 solutions built for these upcoming CPUs was just presented at CES 2012, built around the Panther Point Z77 PCH.
The motherboard in question is called the TZ77XE4 and, judging by its feature set, seems to target users who want a Z77 Ivy Bridge board that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
Moving to the motherboard itself, this comes fitted with what appears to be a 12 phase CPU power design, while an extra phase was added to feed power to the four memory slots.
The board’s expansion features include three PCI Express x16 slots, one PCIe x1 and a pair of regular PCI slots, as well as eight SATA ports, as Legit Review's pictures reveal.
Four of these support SATA 6Gbps transfer speeds, two driven by the Intel Z77 chipset while the other two are controller by a Marvell chip.
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 Crossfire support isn’t mentioned anywhere on the board.
On a plus side, Biostar has managed to put together a very nice looking motherboard with a more than decent layout, which doesn't block any PCI slots with a dual-slot graphics card installed, and the TZ77XE4 also features on-board power and reset buttons.
Moving to the back, the connectivity options available include everything that we expect to see from a high-end Z77 board, such as Quad video out (DVI, VGA, HDMI, and Displayport) and an eSATA port.
Biostar has also added two USB 3.0 ports that are driven by the Intel PCH, while two more such high-speed connectors can be routed to the front of the case by connecting them to the provide on-board header.
No details regarding pricing are available at this time, but the Biostar TZ77XE4 is expected to arrive in Q2 2012 together with Intel’s new processors.
