14 DAY TRIAL // The Z77, one of the chipsets in the Panther Point family, has been used by a certain Chinese company in the making of a microATX motherboard.
The platform is something that does not seem to put too much effort into standing out, save for an additional PCI Express-PCI bridge compared to peers.
Even that extra feature does nothing besides offering a pair of legacy PCI slots, which most consumers won't have much cause to use.
Nevertheless, this is still a mainboard enabled by the technology meant to support Intel's next-generation Ivy Bridge CPUs (central processing units).
As such, the level of performance achievable by a PC when using this as the cornerstone should be considerable.
In fact, even if “just” a Sandy Bridge chip is utilized, the potential is significant, especially if the memory and expansion slots are put to work.
Speaking of which, there is a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot available, meaning that any new video card, no matter how strong, can be added, provided the case is big enough to fit it.
On the same note, ONDA implemented a 4+1 phase VRM, wired to four DDR3 memory slots with dual-channel compatibility.
Not only that, but there is a pair of SATA 6.0 Gbps ports present, along with four SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors. Furthermore, the company did not forget about USB 3.0 supports (four ports, two on the back panel and the others via headers).
The list goes on with the aforementioned legacy PCI slots, a PCI Express 2.0 x1 slot and multiple display outputs (D-Sub, HDMI and DVI).
Finally, since this is the Z77 chipset we are talking about, there is little doubt that Smart Response SSD caching is supported, as well as overclocking.
Unfortunately, no pricing information exists at the moment, nor availability dates. Just the official press shots on Expreview.
