Introduction

Today we start the long and extensive task of working our way through the mountain of Intel Z77 Express based motherboards that we've been collecting since February. While we could've officially started covering them earlier in the month when the Z77 chipset launched we would've been restricted to testing on the current crop of Sandy Bridge CPUs.

Since we thought that the only way to really test the new Z77 chipset was with the new Ivy Bridge CPU, we figured we'd just wait till the official launch later in the month to test the motherboards.

The first of the boards to come off the pile is the one we used in our Intel i7 3770k launch review. The ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe is going to be the first board off the ranks and will follow our typical motherboard review line up.

Since this isn't a board we've looked at in any detail yet we're going to start off with a look at the package. Once we've done that we'll move onto the board itself to see what exactly is going on with the design and feature side of things with the P8Z77-V Deluxe.

Once we've done that we'll get into the BIOS and see what's going on there before we look at our testbed and then cover the overclocking side of things before we get into the performance side of things to find out just what the P8Z77-V Deluxe is capable of.

Package

Opened up we can see some of the main features that the board offers while at the same time we're able to get our first look at the motherboard itself.

Moving inside the package we've got the user guide and driver CD along with six SATA cables, SLI bridge, EZ Connectors, Wi-Fi GO! header and the I/O panel. Along with all that we've also got two wireless antennas to round out the package and help make sure you get the best possible wireless signal.