ASRock are not afraid of the legacy connections.  Not merely content on having both a floppy drive header and an IDE connector on the Fatal1ty Z77 Professional, they have also put a floppy header on the Z77 Extreme6.  There is reason for this, given that industrial equipment can cost $millions and a shiny new PC to process the data costs a lot less, even if they can only communicate via Floppy.  Today we are looking at the performance and package that comes with the Z77 Extreme6, and see if it holds up with its price tag against the vast array of Z77 motherboards currently on the market.

Quad-core mobile Sandy Bridge, 2.5" SSDs and Thunderbolt together have allowed me to use a notebook as my primary work machine. I get all of the portability benefits of a notebook, but with almost none of the performance sacrifices. The only thing I'm really missing is a good, external discrete GPU solution but that's a problem being worked on either via Thunderbolt link aggregation or the second revision of the Thunderbolt spec.

Despite what it's done for me, Thunderbolt has to be one of the most strangely handled interface specs of recent history. Intel engineered the spec, but Apple helped with a lot of the connector and cable design and as a result received a year long exclusive on Thunderbolt. Since its introduction, Thunderbolt has received a reasonable amount of support on the Mac platform. Apple even builds a display designed exclusively for use with Thunderbolt equipped Macs. Companies like Promise, Seagate, Western Digital, LaCie and Elgato are all shipping Mac compatible Thunderbolt devices as well.

With the exclusivity agreement over, Intel's partners in the Windows PC space are allowed to ship Thunderbolt enabled motherboards and systems. Today we have two of the first officially certified Thunderbolt enabled desktop motherboards from ASUS and Intel. Read on for our full analysis!

In the first of our non-full-size Z77 motherboard reviews, we are today getting to grips with the Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H.  Currently retailing at $135, the Z77MX-D3H offers more performance in the microATX factor than some motherboards do in full-fat ATX mode.  This motherboard took high-powered memory in its stride, and on the latest F10 BIOS (at time of testing) Gigabyte claim full compatibility with Xeon E3-12xx processors.  The Z77MX-D3H represents a great crack at a smaller form factor combined with a dual GPU gaming machine.  Read on for the full review.

Marketing is a very powerful tool.  A successful marketing campaign or product segmentation can increase sales more than ten-fold.  It is not something we hear or talk about much in the motherboard arena – while a manufacturer will try and promote all the features they have on a product, advertising is usually limited to web advertisements, gaming shows, or an attempt to get as many positive reviews in the media as possible.  But certain manufacturers do enjoy branding their products – Republic of Gamers, Sniper, Big Bang, and Fatal1ty.  Today we are looking at just that – a Fatal1ty branded product, the ASRock Fatal1ty Z77 Professional. 

Now that Panther Point is in full swing, and perhaps Sandy Bridge processor stocks may start to dwindle in favor of Ivy Bridge, market segmentation of motherboards is all too critical.  We have gamers (budget and enthusiast), casual users, audio enthusiasts, HTPC users, storage users, power users, enthusiasts, modders, silent users, overclockers, extreme users or perhaps a combination of many.  Therefore, when it comes to designing a range of boards, a motherboard manufacturer has priority targets.  They can design either a product to go for one target, or a product to cover several.  ASUS have a minimum of 13 boards in their current Z77 lineup (not covering H77), with a few more still to be released.  One of those 13 is the P8Z77-V Deluxe, a high end product focused on power users who want extremes of functionality and the best of most worlds - an Intel NIC (+Realtek), more SATA, dual band WiFi, fan control, provision for Thunderbolt as well as regular ASUS features such as BIOS Flashback, Q-LED, the BIOS itself and AI Suite software.  Even with all of this, it also transpires that the Deluxe is quite good at throughput and IO as well.

Read on for our review.

I finally made the transition to a notebook as my desktop last year, a move many had made years prior. Quad-core mobile Sandy Bridge and good SSDs made the move simple for me, but Thunderbolt eventually made it near perfect. With only two drive bays in my notebook (I ditched my optical drive so I could have another SSD, something Brian Klug did back in 2010), there wasn't any room for good, high-performance, mass storage. Thunderbolt solved this problem for me.

Co-developed by Apple and Intel, Thunderbolt is a tunnel that carries both PCIe and DisplayPort traffic to the tune of 20Gbps per channel (10Gbps up and down). In the past, whenever you wanted to add a PCIe device (LAN, audio, high-speed storage, etc...) you needed to physically install that device in your system either via an ExpressCard slot on a notebook or via a PCIe slot on your desktop. Thunderbolt acts as a decoupler for PCIe devices, allowing you to put controllers that would traditionally lie inside your system outside of it, or even inside another device like a display. That's where the DisplayPort support comes in.

Apple's Thunderbolt Display is the perfect example of what Thunderbolt can be used to do. Take a DisplayPort panel, integrate Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire 800, audio and USB controllers and you've got Apple's Thunderbolt Display. In theory, you could connect a system that had none of these things, and the functionality would be provided exclusively by the display. Decoupling hardware like this allows OEMs to build thinner and/or smaller form factor machines (think Ultrabooks/MacBook Air), while allowing for full functionality when connected to a display. By carrying DisplayPort over the same cable, you can have a single cable that both extends functionality and connects your small form factor machine to a larger monitor. Thunderbolt enables the modern day dock for notebooks.

For all of last year, Thunderbolt was an Apple exclusive. This year, starting with the launch of Ivy Bridge, Thunderbolt is coming to PCs. We'll see it on notebooks as well as some desktop motherboards. Today we have the very first desktop motherboard with Thunderbolt support: MSI's Z77A-GD80.

Read on for our full preview of the first Thunderbolt PC motherboard.

So we have survived one of the biggest days of the year for all things computer performance related - the release of Intel's new Ivy Bridge processor.  It replaces Sandy Bridge in the landscape of all things processor related, with Ivy Bridge boasting better single threaded performance at lower power usage when at stock speeds.  Despite Ivy Bridge being in the same socket as Sandy Bridge, we have a new trio of chipsets to tackle.  As in my previous chipset and motherboard preview, AnandTech has a series of boards ready to put through their paces with the glory of Ivy Bridge.

Today our first set of reviews begin with the ASRock Z77 Extreme4, the ASUS P8Z77-V Pro, the Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H, and the MSI Z77A-GD65.  Read on for the full reviews.

Thanks to everyone who entered our last giveaway. We're waiting for eligibility confirmation from our four potential winners: bigbluerobo, nhilyna, Lord 666 and fiftysixtius. Respond to the email in your inbox to verify your eligibility and claim your prize!

If you didn't win last time, don't worry - MSI came through with a Z77 motherboard of their own to give away to one lucky reader. MSI's Z77A-GD65 is pictured below and it's what we're giving away starting today:

Read on for entry details!

A couple of weeks ago we ran a call for questions as I got word that ASUS would be paying me a visit in NC. JJ from ASUS sat down with me and we had a discussion about Ivy Bridge, the 7-series chipset, ASUS' lineup and more. As promised, we also answered some of your questions in the video itself. Questions that didn't get answered in the video will be answered in the comments thread of the original post. 

The part I didn't mention was that ASUS is also giving away four 7-series motherboards from its lineup to AnandTech readers. The boards ASUS is giving away are listed below:

ASUS ROG Maximus V Gene (micro-ATX)
ASUS Sabertooth Z77 (ATX)
ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe (ATX)
ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe (mITX)

We're giving them all away starting today. Ranging from the insanely compact mini-ITX P8Z77-I Deluxe to the thermal armor equipped Sabertooth Z77. If you were on the fence about the move to Ivy Bridge, this may be what pushes you over.

Read on for full details on how to enter the giveaway!

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.

Well, today is a day that everyone was expecting, but perhaps not the most exciting day of the month. Today, Intel officially releases the spate of 7-series chipsets for their 3^rd generation Core microarchitecture processors (read—Ivy Bridge), despite the actual release of the processors being another three weeks away. This means that today we can actually look at, test, or purchase the range of motherboards that natively support Ivy Bridge. However, we can’t officially publish all the benchmarks for these products using Ivy Bridge until that date three weeks away (to be honest, we are still testing!). So today we are going to have a good in depth look into the Z77 chipset itself, and the review products we have received to let you know what we think looks good. All these boards today will be fully reviewed, warts and all, with Ivy Bridge, as close to official release as possible.

The boards today are from ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS and Biostar. All these boards will natively support Sandy Bridge processors, and be fully upgradeable to Ivy Bridge silicon when the processors are released. Read on for the preview.

Ever since the launch of the Bulldozer range and 9-series motherboards, the initial reviews of the processors were not encouraging to say the least.  Since then, AMD has decided to pull out of the enthusiast end of the CPU market, to focus in on the mainstream and low power processors.  This is despite the fact that Windows 7 (and Windows 8, natively) is now receiving updates so the operating system can understand the processor architecture a little better, and hopefully boost performance.  This gives a second wind to those owning (or thinking of owning) a Bulldozer based processor, and in turn, a 900-series motherboard.  With the updates in hand, today we are looking at five 990FX boards that may feature on the consumer or system builders’ radar. 

Read on for the full review.

Today we are looking at the Gigabyte GA-A55M-S2V, the first A55 motherboard to hit the AnandTech test beds. In comparison to the A75 platform which we have covered extensively, although the A55 lacks a few features such as USB 3.0, SATA 6 Gbps and a second full length PCIe slot, the A55 motherboards are usually aimed at low end, low budget system builders. The Gigabyte GA-A55M-S2V comes in at a smaller than mATX form factor for just such occasions.  Please read on for the full review.

With Intel's next generation processors firmly on the horizon, we should also turn to what motherboards will be on offer when we have the opportunity to root around in our pockets to invest in an next generation system.  With appropriate vendor support, 6-series motherboards will support these new processors with little more than a BIOS update, however to get the most out of the new processor, we have to look at the new range of motherboards about to hit the market.  This brief look at some of them is by no means an exhaustive list, however we would like to know what you find most interesting and would like to be reviewed over the next few months.

The cream of the MSI enthusiast range is the Big Bang series – in P55 we got the Trinergy and the Fuzion, for X58 we were treated to the XPower, in P67 there was the Marshal, and now with X79 MSI has graced us with the XPower II in the loosely defined XL-ATX form factor. Due to the increased size of the board (in length), the consumer is treated to seven PCIe slots, running at x16/x8/x8/x8 in full quad-GPU mode. This is also alongside some novelty heatsink design in the shape of a Gatling gun for the VRMs and rounds in an open magazine for the chipset. MSI even try and pull a sneaky one in the BIOS settings for better default performance depending on which BIOS you use. Read on for the full review!