ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt (Intel Z77) Motherboard Review (Page 2)

ASUS P8Z77-V Pro/Thunderbolt Motherboard

You can see we've got a black PCB, which we love to see. As for the rest goes, we've got a dark / light blue setup, which we're not the biggest fans of. When it comes to ASUS boards we can't deny the red and black conversation on the ROG-based boards are indeed the ones that grab our attention the most.

Along with two legacy PCI slots you can see we've also got two PCIe x1 slots. Along with that we've got three PCI x16 slots to round off the expansion side of things. As for those x16 the top most one is wired at x16 while the other two are wired at x8. If you opt for a two card setup it will be x8 / x8, while if you use all three the slots will run at x8 / x4 / x4.

Heading across the bottom of the board it's very much the same old procedure for the most part. You can see the TPM header along with an impressive five USB 2.0 headers. Between these headers we have the USB BIOS Flashback button, while the far right gives us the main front panel header.

Turning the corner you can see the TPU and EPU button along with a Serial Port header. SATA ports come in the form of eight with the four light blue ones being SATA II running off the Z77 chipset, while the two white ones are SATA III running off the same chipset. The final two dark blue ones are also SATA III, but these particular ones run off the ASMedia controller.

Heading towards the top of the board you can see four DIMM slots offering support for up to 32GB of DDR3 ranging from 1066MHz DDR all the way to 2600MHz DDR via overclocking. Below these we have the main 24-pin ATX power connector with the MEM OK! switch on the right and a USB 3.0 header along with two fan headers on the left hand side.

Moving around to the CPU area you can see the 8-pin CPU power connector towards the top of the board and a fairly nice looking heatsink setup around the CPU socket. Like most boards these days the overall setup around here is pretty clean and apart from the heatsinks there's generally not a whole lot more to see.

Finishing up with the I/O side of things you can see a combo PS/2 port along with four USB 3.0 connectors. We've got an optical out port that goes with the six auxiliary ports that run off the Realtek ALC892 HD chip. Video out options include HDMI, DVI and VGA - lacking DisplayPort. Gigabit networking is provided by the Intel 82579V controller and finally on the far right you can see a single Thunderbolt port.