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. T