Close-up look at GIGABYTE's Intel Z77 Ivy Bridge motherboards

http://www.tweaktown.com Earlier on today we visited the GIGABYTE headquarters here in Taipei where we got some exclusive hands-on time with its range of upcoming Intel Z77 "Ivy Bridge" Socket 1155 motherboards. These are the boards that will support the upcoming third and fourth generation Intel Core processors that are due to come onto the market sometime in April as far as we know at this stage of the game.

We also know that the performance of these said processors is really impressive and the power consumption numbers are great, too. We cannot go into too many details about this platform at this stage, but what we can do is give you a look at what GIGABYTE has planned for the platform with a look at four of its upcoming Z77 boards which we went hands-on with today.

We'll start off with the big daddy which is the G1.Sniper 3, this is a board designer for gamers as well as overclockers and represents as the highest end Z77 board from GIGABYTE at this stage. It comes with an improved cooling setup with oversized heatsinks and a more minimalistic cooler design - rather than a big gun shaped heatsink at the south end of the board, there is just a small golden skull with a knife held in its mouth.

The board has support for three-way SLI and four-way CrossFireX thanks to the inclusion of a PLX bridge chip which provides extra PCI Express lanes. It has some other good features including Creative Core3D quad-core audio processor onboard sound with a shielded setup to reduce electrical interference, dual gigabit LAN (one Intel and one Qualcomm Killer Game Networking), Lucid Virtu MVP, mSATA and plenty of USB 3.0 support which now comes curtsey natively via the Z77 chipset from Intel.

Next up we move down to the Z77X-UD5H which is similar in many ways to the G1.Sniper 3, except of course being a cheaper model, it has some features taken off. For one it doesn't include the additional PLX bridge which means the board only gets two-way SLI and CrossFire support. This board still features the oversized heatsinks, ...