A Brief Look at Some Upcoming 7-Series Motherboards
by Ian Cutress on March 9, 2012 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Intel
- H77
- Z77
ASRock
ASRock are now becoming a stable option when it comes to buying motherboards. As a company, they are now producing a large amount of good product with an expected ten million motherboard sales in 2012, and seem to have enough backing to perhaps push it a little forward ahead of other competitors. When it comes to releasing new chipsets, ASRock have recently always been releasing their Extreme series (numbered currently from 3 to 9), and their gaming Fatal1ty series for more enthusiast style users. For the most part, their cheaper offerings often hit a nice price/feature ratio that is comfortable on the wallet.
For the 7-series, ASRock have fully updated their website with models we expect ASRock to launch:
H77M
H77 Pro4-M
H77 Pro4/MVP
Z77 Pro4
Z77 Extreme4-M
Z77 Extreme4
Z77 Extreme6
Fatal1ty Z77 Professional
Fatal1ty Z77 Professional-M
Fatal1ty Z77 Performance
ASRock Z77 Extreme6
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If we extrapolate from our look at ASRock boards for P67 and X79, the Z77 Extreme4 and Z77 Extreme6 should be a pair of good boards to consider out of the starting block. As we can see, the Z77 Extreme6 goes all out on the black and gold livery ASRock demonstrated with X79, and plugs in a USB 3.0 front panel which doubly acts as a SSD holder. On the board itself, we still see a 4-pin molex connector rear its ugly head again above the PCIe ports, and if I'm very much mistaken, we also have a Floppy drive port on the south side of the board. I did quiz ASRock once as to why they're putting legacy ports back onto some of their lineup, and the response I got was 'some people want that functionality'. I could perhaps see the requirement in industry when a 6-figure piece of industrial equipment still uses floppy drives (and the cost of upgrading that equipment is too high for USB), however I would relegate that function to the lower end of the spectrum.
ECS
ECS have always been somewhat odd when trying to predict what of their main channel products will reach the market. They tackle each chipset differently, deciding what proportion of the market will invest in it, then design products at various price points to suit that need. This is all despite being a primarily OEM manufacturer and distributor. When it comes to the 7-series chipsets, it is clear that while they will be more important than Sandy Bridge-E was, it could swing either way whether they will outstrip Sandy Bridge before we get Intel's next architecture down the line.
Nevertheless, ECS have dutifully supplied a couple of images of their top-end upcoming boards, and to be honest, I'd say they were taking a leaf out of ASRock's book..
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ECS Z77H2-AX
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The Z77H2-AX is ECS' answer to the 7-series, and it looks packed with functionality. If I'm not mistaken, if we ignore the ASRock-like gold and black, we have a mSATA port blow the SATA ports, and built in Wifi and Bluetooth modules on the IO panel. This is despite also having video outputs. The ECS board I reviewed for X79, whilst it was under rebate, was quite a bargain in terms of functionality and price, so I hope that ECS can deliver similar for the 7-series.
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ComputerGuy2006 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I like how both the ASUS P8Z77 WS and the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe have dual NIC. But without a hex core to go with these mobo's look like I am going to be stuck with my slow 1336 till ivy bridge-e....johnpombrio - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Take a look at Anand's review of Ivy Bridge. He uses the SB- E as part of the benchmarking. It turns out that having those 6/12 cores and the extra cache did not make these expensive chips run most stuff any faster than the much less expensive IB. That decided me right there to upgrade to IB rather than to the SB -E chips. So Ivy Bridge with a Z77 chipset is the way to go unless you are doing some serious stuff with transcoding or double or triple SLI..euler007 - Sunday, March 11, 2012 - link
But people on the internets will have more cores than him!lunarx3dfx - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
My 1366 920 is still hanging in there pretty good, and I was waiting on SB-E to upgrade, but I'm with John. The performance upgrade wasn't significant enough to justify the cost, so it looks like it'll be IB for me. Who cares about 6 or more cores if there isn't a huge performance gain?aguilpa1 - Monday, March 12, 2012 - link
I'm in the same boat, Don't let Intel know but there is usually one GRAND chip that can hold its own against several generations of mediocre chips before an upgrade is needed. The i7 920 when OC'ed is one and the Q6600 was the one before that. I had both and now I'm on the 920 and there doesn't seem to be a good reason to upgrade until IB.Samus - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 - link
I've had an Asus x58 chipset board with a i7-950 for over 3 years, I have upgraded nothing. It is still faster than 90% of the computers on the market, and within 20% of the performance of mainstream Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips.There is no compelling reason to upgrade to Socket 1155 from Socket 1366. I agree with john and lunar in waiting for the next socket/architecture.
Intel really outdid themselves with Bloomfield.
adece - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Unless Gygabyte or ASRock puts WiFi on a sub $220 Mobo of their's, my money is going to Asus.deltatux - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
It would have been nice if ASUS or GIGABYTE would put at least one or two PCI slots. There are still a lot of sound cards and TV tuners that are mainly PCI.It would definitely suck if I am forced to upgrade my sound card which works perfectly just because new motherboards force users to upgrade even though the majority is still on the older tech.
Don't get me wrong, PCI is long overdue to get replaced but honestly, there's still too many of these expansion cards which are still reliant on the older PCI bus.
Concillian - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Several Z68 / P67 mobos have PCI slots, will support IB, and should be available for a while.The Z77 chipset has no PCI outputs. It's a little unfair to blame the motherboard makers for not including a feature that is not in the base chipset. It can't be simple to just slap a PCI slot on a mobo with a chipset that is designed not to use them.
DanNeely - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Theoretically they could use a PCIe-PCI bridge chip to add a legacy slot; but the cost of doing so (to include the engineering work to integrate it) would probably exceed that of buying a higher end chip from Intel.