14 DAY TRIAL // There are a whole bunch of Intel-based motherboards on the way, five of which will be aimed at media-centric PCs and, consequently, will bear the Media name.
VR-Zone managed to provide pretty much all the information anyone could ever need on this product series, much like they did for the Executive line.
As we have written here, the Executive series of mainboards is made of small form factor platforms for office PCs and other such things.
The Media motherboards are, for the most part, comparatively small (the Extreme series includes the large ones), but they utilize different Panther Point chipsets.
While the Executive rely on B75 and Q77, the Media use H77, Z75 and Z77. We will cover the H77 here and leave the others for later.
There is a single, full-size ATX model, the DH77KC, based on H77 and codenamed Knoll Creek. It has support for a single graphics card (PCI Express 3.0 x16), but also comes with a PCI Express x1 2.0 slot and a PCI Express slot for mSATA SSDs.
Additionally, there are four RAM slots, three SATA 3 Gbps ports, two SATA 6 Gbps ports, two USB 3.0 ports, 7.1-channel audio (with optical S/PDIF), and other connectors (parallel port, USB 2.0, etc.)
Furthermore, one will find three PCI slots, a PCI Express x4 2.0 slot, a PS2 port, Gigabit Ethernet and three display outputs (DisplayPort, DVI-I and HDMI).
The second board, which may tentatively be called the “bottom” model, is the micro-ATX DH77EB (Eb Lake), which is similar to the one above, but lacks PCI Express x4 2.0, the PS2, and the legacy PCI. It does have three PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots instead of one, though.
Moving on, the DH77DF, the third and final H77 board, is called Dry Fork and uses the mini-ITX form factor. It offers one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, two DIMM RAM slots, the same PCI Express slot for mSATA as above and four SATA ports (two 3Gbps and two 6Gbps), plus headers for USB 3.0, 2.0 and FireWire.
The I/O panel on the back has four USB 2.0, two USB 3.0 and an eSATA port, plus a FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 audio with optical S/PDIF and DisplayPort / HDMI / DVI-I video.
There are no photos, unfortunately, nor pricing or release dates. April is when official availability should arrive, so get those finances in good shape.