Sin from Sin City! GIGABYTE Z77 Boards at CES

Details: Category: GIGABYTE; Created on Monday, 09 January 2012 22:43; Published on Tuesday, 10 January 2012 00:46; Written by Mike

Today we bring you some really cool new Z77 boards from CES@LasVegas in the GIGABYTE suite. Let me just get down to business.

First off GIGABYTE has given all of their upcoming Z77 boards an mSATA port which would suggest that all of their boards are setup to use SSD Caching. Next off it seems that most if not all of these boards also have an iGPU output. Apart from the basic Z77 features we also see that GIGABYTE has once again redefined their product lineup. Instead of a UD7 to UD3 and then a G1 series, we have a G1 series at the top and then a UD5 following it. GIGABYTE has also introduced probably their first enthusiast mATX board, the G1 M3 which carries the Creative audio and some G1 series features. It seems that GIGABYTE has done a few other things as well such as added OC features to their entire lineup except for the M3.

Let's start off with the G1 Sniper 3, which seems to be GIGABYTE's flagship Z77 board.

The G1 Sniper 3 seems to support more than the native 2-Way SLI/CF through a PCI-E 3.0 bridge chip, which isn't an NF200 nor a lucid made component. We see some beefy heatsinks, but GB promises us these aren't even close to the finals. This board is featuring the new Creative Core3D as a replacement for the amazing C20K2 which has served the G1 series well for the past year through 2 generations. We also see that the Bigfoot e2200 has been replaced by what we are told is a newer more integrated Bigfoot NIC. We are seeing more and more integration in terms of the Creative Audio and the Bigfoot NIC, we no longer see the external memory and other support components such as a PHY for the NIC. Hopefully that will serve these boards well.

The G1 Sniper 3 has a 12+2+1 phase VRM which to us indicates support for the iGPU and some hefty OC.

What is very nice to see is the OC features which have been missing from the previous G1 series. We have a POST code display, along with voltage read points, and power/reset/clearCMOS buttons which all overclockers require.

Here we see a Digital PWM made by IR it is 6+2 phases.

Here we have that new audio and NIC.

The G1 Sniper M3 is up next, this mATX motherboard is to give gamers a nice LAN party system which is easier to carry around. It lacks the OC features which all the other boards have, but should fall in at a pretty reasonable price.

We see a 6+2+1 phase design, once again should have iGPU support.

USB 3.0 internal header well placed on all boards including the mATX one.

Instead of the Bigfoot NIC we have the loved Intel NIC, which actually many users have been asking for on a G1 board.

The Z77-UD5H is a beefy board, all the OC features previously mentioned are still here, but we lack 3-Way SLI/CF which the G1 Sniper 3 has, but we are provided with a 3rd 16x slot which should have 4X bandwidth directly wired to the PCH.