ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe Motherboard

Having a look at the board we can of course notice straight away the square mATX structure of the board. Overall we're able to get a good look at everything, but we'll move in a little closer and cover everything in a bit more detail.

Moving in closer we can see the PCIe setup. We've got a single PCIe 4x slot at the bottom and two PCIe x16 slots. If you're using just one video card that'll run at x16, in the event you're going down the path of SLI or CrossFire, they'll both run at 8x.

Moving across the bottom of the board you can see we've got the power and reset buttons. Along with that we've also got a couple of USB 2.0 headers, fan header and the main front panel connector.

Turning the corner we've got a total of six SATA ports present. The two black ones on the far left are SATA II and run off the Z77 chipset while the two next to that run off the same chipset, but are SATA III. Next to that we've got two more SATA III ports that run off the ASMedia controller. Also here we can see the debug reader that lets us know the status of the board.

Heading to the top of the board we can see four DIMM slots that support 32GB of DDR3 up to speeds of 2800MHz DDR via overclocking. We can also see the main ATX power connector with a USB 3.0 header on the left and the ASUS GO Button on the right hand side.

Moving around the top you can see we've got a couple of fan headers and the main 8-pin power connector. Stepping back slightly we can see the CPU area and the heatsink setup, which is strong considering the size of the board. It's typical ASUS ROG quality which is always top notch.

Heading over to the I/O side of things we've got a BIOS reset button and ROG Connect button. Next to that we've got four USB 2.0 ports with the bottom one being the white ROG connect one. Next to that we've got two USB 3.0 ports and an eSATA connector.

Moving across we've got a DisplayPort and HDMI connector for video out and a SPIDF connector at the top. Then there are two more USB 3.0 headers and a Gigabit LAN port running off the Intel controller. Finally we finish up with six auxiliary ports which as we mentioned on the first page run off the SurpremeFX III HD audio codec.

Moving around the I/O area and honing in towards the left we can see the mPCIe Combo connector that sits between the BIOS reset button and ROG connect one.

Above you can see our mPCIe combo card installed sitting nicely. It's a fairly easy installation with a single screw that holds the whole card in place. It's a cool little setup that as we said earlier gives us the ability to expand upon the features with little space.