14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may be trying to enforce a specific date before which its partners aren't allowed to unleash 7-series mainboards, but its luck hasn't held out perfectly.
Chinese company Wibtek decided to defy the chip giant's authority and reveal the Hacker Z77 motherboard some days sooner.
If anything, this allowed it to get some attention from the media, attention that it would not have enjoyed otherwise.
After all, if it held to the plan, its company and product name would have probably drowned in the flood of products from better-known Intel manufacturing partners, like MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.
Marketing stunts aside, the Wibtek Hacker Z77 - the first Z77-based motherboard - is quite a decent item.
Granted, its sizable on-board heatsink ended up slightly crowding the CPU socket area, but the rest of the feature set is fairly fine-tuned.
There are 16 power phases for the central processing unit, two x16 PCI Express slots (the second one works in x8 mode), two PCI Express x1 slots, a pair of legacy PCI slots and ten SATA ports.
Six of the SATA connectors are of the 6.0 Gbps variety (SATA III) while the remaining four have a limit of 3.0 Gbps (SATA II).
Two Marvell controllers were integrated into the motherboard's design, without which it would have been impossible to provide so many storage ports (each Marvell chip directs two SATA 6.0 Gbps).
Aesthetically, Wibtek selected a gun heatsink theme, saying it should be a “desert eagle” design, even though it could be argued that the shape is more reminiscent of a blaster pistol or beam gun.
Expreview is where the photos surfaced. They weren't made in a very high resolution, but they did reveal all the above details, as well as the existence of on-board start/reset/CMOS buttons and a pair of front USB 3.0 expansion connectors.
Finally, Wibtek used a black on dark brown color theme for the PCB and slots of the Hacker Z77.
