What better way to pair your new Ivy Bridge
processor than with an Intel motherboard?
Now that you've seen what Intel's latest
processor can do, it's time to look at the company's motherboard offering. And
oh boy it's a doozy. The one we'll be taking a look at is the D77GA-70K, part
of Intel's Extreme series motherboards, which is optimised for Intel's K-series
processors.
As if taking design cues from the
packaging, the D77GA-70K's board is clad in all black, adding to the edginess
of the product. We have four SODIMM RAM slots capable of quad channel memory,
eight SATA ports, two of which are for RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 and two PCIe 3.0 x16
slots which can be used for either SLI with NVIDIA cards or CrossFireX with AMD
cards.
At the back are four SuperSpeed USB 3.0
ports, four Highspeed USB 2.0 ports, four of each which are also available mid
board, a HDMI video connector, an eSATA port, a IEEE 1394 port, 10-channel
audio ports and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports.
Onwards to the software portion of things,
Intel has again implemented UEFI to its BIOS, and this is great as it makes it
easier for users to change settings such as boot order and overclocking that
much easier.
Speaking of overclocking, we managed to get
our processor to clock up to about 4.3GHz, at which point the fan started
blowing really hot air at us. Despite this however, the system ran smoothly,
but if you're going to overclock the processor past a certain clock speed, we
would recommend getting better cooling options.
For extra fast performance, we used an SSD
as our boot device, and to our delight the system booted up faster than you can
blink. The SATA 3.0 6gbps port definitely made full use of the SSD's speeds,
and it shows during startup and software installation progress.
And if you're building a multi graphics
setup, the motherboard also has Lucid Virtu which means less screen tears.
Intel
Desktop Board DZ77GA-70K
Price $247
Info www.intel.com
Specifications
Platform: 3rd and 2nd Generation Intel
Core Processors
Form Factor: ATX
Chipset: Z77
Memory type: DDR3
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Comment
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(+) Overclocks well
UEFI BIOS
Good set of useful features
(-) None
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