ASUS Ivy Bridge/7-Series Chipset Q&A
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 12, 2012 7:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Motherboards
- Asus
- Ivy Bridge
Intel officially launched the Z77 platform earlier this week, and later this month we'll see the official launch of Ivy Bridge, Intel's 3rd generation Core processors. ASUS has agreed to cart nearly everything it makes (including a handful of unreleased products we saw at CES) over to me in NC for a hands on look on video. More importantly - we're going to be doing a Q&A with you all.
ASUS and I will both be answering your questions on camera. If you have any questions you'd like to see us answer or topics you'd like us to address, respond to the comments here or mention @anandtech with the hashtag #asusivy on Twitter along with your question/topic. We won't be able to get to all of them but we'll pick the most interesting/relevant questions and answer them on camera. The topic is obviously going to be Ivy Bridge and the 7-series platform. Simple questions are fine but what I'd really like to see are topics we can have a good discussion about.
When the video goes live, ASUS is also going to let us give away some new Z77 boards as well. We'll have more details on the giveaway closer to the Ivy Bridge launch.
Make the questions good and I look forward to answering them on camera.
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Moden - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
Are there any plans for MATX boards with more than six internal SATA ports? Given the new smaller cases and the HTPC market having eight ports can be useful allowing one for the ODD, one for a front eSATA connection, one for SSD boot drive, and five for data drives.I am currently using a Lian-Li MATX case that has support for this many drives with a hot swap backplane and would like to migrate my Sandy Bridge cpu to it when I upgrade my main machine to Ivy Bridge with a new ASUS Z77 motherboard. I am a huge fan of the ASUS UEFI bios replacement and currently have the P8P67 Deluxe SB board in my main rig.
I'd also like to know if there are plans to update the bios to on the P8P67 boards to support Ivy Bridge.
Iketh - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
Asus, can we get a mobo that allows us to select which cores to disable in the cpu? Is this even possible? My 2600K's core 0 is the runt of the chip, but because it's core 0, it's impossible to turn it off with the current feature design.Achieving this would give you a huge +1 from enthusiasts.
BVKnight - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
In some Z68 boards, there wasn't enough PCIe bandwidth to power all of the PCIe slots and ports on the board simultaneously. If you plugged something into one of the last ports on the board, it disabled other features. Some boards included a PLX chip to counteract this.On Z77 and Z75, is there more bandwidth in the chipset to prevent this from happening? Will all Z77 boards be able to fully power all their card slots and ports, without the end-user having to cherry-pick what they want to use? Or do we have to look for another board with a PLX chip?
weewoo87 - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
1) What does it really have to offer over Z68?2) What is your (Anand) favorite feature of the ASUS line of Z77 boards that sets them apart?
videogames101 - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
Are we going to have dual PCI-E 3.0 16x lanes available, or are we again relegated to 8x/8x for dual-gpu (and greater) configurations?CrispySilicon - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
Details on the two features above please! Formula board really looks like one I can sink my teeth into so to speak.ncrubyguy - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
ASUS has consistently enabled ECC on pretty much all of their AMD boards (not just "workstation" and "server" boards). That's a big factor in my continued loyalty. Why not do the same on Intel boards?(Also, how do we know which boards support things like ECC and VT-d/IOMMU? Is there a list somewhere?)
JackM - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
Yes there is, it's called Intel's ARKhttp://ark.intel.com/
The reason ASUS enables ECC for AMD and not for Intel is because AMD enables ECC memory support in (almost) all their CPUs to work with just about any chipset, while Intel limits ECC to Xeon CPUs in combination with certain chipsets (X59 / X79 or the Xeon-specific C2xx / C6xx chipsets).
Compare the Core i7 2600K (http://ark.intel.com/products/52214) with the Xeon E3 1275
(http://ark.intel.com/products/52277). Same speed, same cache, but difference in the little details, such as ECC support.
ncrubyguy - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
The requested list was for motherboards. ARK is for chips. I was hoping the IMC would open up ECC as a possibility for Intel the way it did for AMD. But why give away built-in functionality when you can charge extra for it?obsidian009 - Friday, April 13, 2012 - link
What improvements have been made to onboard sound with the new Asus motherboards?