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Intel Launches Z77 Motherboards, Preparing For Ivy Bridge
MojoKid writes "In preparation for the arrival of their 3rd Generation Core processor products based on their Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, Intel has readied a new chipset dubbed the Z77 Express. New socket 1155 Ivy Bridge processors offer 16 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 or 3.0 connectivity on-die and they feature integrated dual-channel, DDR3 memory controllers with maximum officially supported speeds of up to 1600MHz. The processors are linked to the Z77 chipset via Intel's FDI (Flexible Display Interface) and 20Gb/s DMI 2.0 interfaces. The chipset itself is outfitted with 8 more PCIe 2.0 lanes, six ports of SATA (II and III), an integrated Gigabit MAC, and digital display outputs for up to three displays. Making its debut for the first time in an Intel chipset is also native USB 3.0 support with four USB 3.0 and ten USB 2.0 ports built in."
Gigabit MAC? Yum. Gigs & Gigs served.
I have an AMD CPU and I got here first!
Nice try, second place.
From what I've seen from the specs of the latest socket 2011 boards, they allow upto 64GB on desktop models, but I'm not shure I'd like to have that amount of RAM without ECC.
Uhh, LGA1155 boards have been able to do 32GB of RAM since a year and a half ago, as had LGA1156 boards before that.
I would certainly hope your servers have more than 16 gigabits of RAM.
As with most Intel chipset releases, there really isn't much to get excited about here. "Native" USB3 might be exciting to someone somewhere, but from a practical standpoint we've been getting USB3 on motherboards for the last couple years anyway, and extra PCIe lanes are for the most part only interesting to nutball gamers.
Z-series chipsets are enthusiast products. Basically all this stuff just integrates features that are already on $150+ motherboards into Intel's chips.
I give this a hearty "meh."
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Score: -3; Factually Incorrect
1) no, you get 16x PCIe 2.0 as a fallback if the card does not support PCIe 3.0
2) if you want SLI/CF, you can use either 8x PCIe 3.0 or 8x PCIe 2.0 for the two graphics card slots. No current graphics card saturates PCIe 2.0 8x, so this is more than sufficient for 2 way SLI/CF.
3) USB 3 and SATA 6 are not on the PCIe bus at all, so they don't leach bandwidth.
duel x16
En garde, all sixteen of you!
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I'm showing my age here, but I remember the days when MACs were only 48 bits.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I just have to say, back when I was doing a lot of hardware work, I would have happily launched 277 motherboards ... with a catapult.
I am officially gone from
They can come out with as many "hardcore" boards as they want, and that will do nothing to change the fact that the Z77 chipset only adds 8 PCI-e lanes.
One nice RAID controller and you're done. Thanks a lot, Intel.
they allow upto 64GB on desktop models
Are you sure? The Z80 chipset only used to allow 64kB and the Z77 is presumably three models earlier.
get real, the multimedia channels aren't up to recommended specs for her Ultraporn.
I think a lot of commenters on this are missing the point that 16 lanes of PCI-e 3.0 directly on-die is going to be a massive boost to Native PCI-e NAND Flash implementations (Fusion-io, for example). One of the biggest hurdles to getting more productivity out of faster CPUs and the proliferation of sockets/cores is feeding data to those CPUs. The disparity here is staggering... CPUs have improved by over a million times where storage interfaces and devices have only improved perhaps 100x (being generous) in the same timeframe. This change puts many terabytes of native PCIe NAND flash memory in very close proximity to the CPU complex and will enable vastly more efficient applications.