Stefan Mileschin

Motherboard maker Sapphire has just announced a new mainboard developed to support the latest family of CPUs from Intel.

The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z77/K is a full ATX sized board that runs the latest Intel i7/i5/i3 processor family using socket LGA1155.

It has multiple PCI-Express 3.0 Gen3, USB 3.0, SATA 6G and extensive I/O support. There are four dual channel memory sockets provided, supporting up to 16GB of DDR3 memory.

The board has four SATA2 3Gb/s ports, and two SATA3 6Gb/s ports featuring AHCI and RAID support, mounted on the edge of the board with right angle connectors.

There is a Realtek Gigabit LAN and a second optional E2200 Gigabit LAN.

The card has four USB 3.0 ports and as ten USB 2.0 ports. The rear panel also carries optical SPDIF as well as the standard I/O configuration for the on board HD 7.1 Audio. Outputs for the on-chip Intel HD graphics are DVI, HDMI and VGA.

There are four PCI-Express Gen 3.0 X16 slots, which allow up to four graphics cards to be used in CrossFireX. It also has two PCI-Express X1 slots.

The card has a dual BIOS to allow for experimentation and overclocking.

http://news.techeye.net/hardware/sap...-z77-mainboard