Gigabyte 7-series motherboard preview from CES 2012

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If you've been waiting for some more consumer friendly motherboards than the dual-socket workstation board we've seen so far from CES, then we have good news, we've got a few shots of Gigabyte's upcoming Intel 7-series motherboards. The boards on display at the show are far from the final versions and we do have some press shots to show as well, although at fairly low resolution, but it'll give you a better idea of what the final boards should look like.

[siopao1984]

If you've been waiting for some more consumer friendly motherboards than the dual-socket workstation board we've seen so far from CES, then we have good news, we've got a few shots of Gigabyte's upcoming Intel 7-series motherboards. The boards on display at the show are far from the final versions and we do have some press shots to show as well, although at fairly low resolution, but it'll give you a better idea of what the final boards should look like.



As with Gigabyte's X79-series motherboards, the upcoming 7-series boards for the LGA-1155 socket will be equipped with digital PWMs, Gigabyte's 3D Power and of course the 3D UEFI. However, there's a lot more to these new boards and there are a few really interesting additions that we can expect at the launch.



Just to keep you waiting for the good stuff we'll start with the B75M-D3H, a motherboard Gigabyte is targeting towards the small business market. Even so it's a fairly well-rounded board and the chipset has support for Intel's Small Business Advantage software that allows for better manageability than your average consumer motherboard. The B75 chipset offers native USB 3.0 support for up to four ports and a single SATA 6Gbps port. Gigabyte has also included DVI and HDMI and in this case the PCI slots are actually native to the chipset.



Moving up one step we have the H77M-D3H, a board that wasn't part of Gigabyte's press release, but a model that was being shown of briefly at CES. This board is very similar to the B75M-D3H, but as the name suggests it's based on the H77 chipset instead. The only real difference that we noticed is that one of the PCI slots have been replaced by a x1 PCI Express slot and in this case the PCI slot isn't native to the chipset.



The first full-size ATX board is the Z77-D3H and now things are starting to get a little bit more interesting. Although Gigabyte introduced a few 6-series motherboards with mSATA connectivity, the company has now gone full-out adding m-SATA to most of its7-series ATX models. The Z77-D3H is the most basic model with an mSATA connector. Other features as per standard of the Z77 chipset include two SATA 6Gbps ports and four USB 3.0 ports. We're not entirely sure about the display options here, but it looks like DVI and possibly HDMI as well as a D-sub connector. This board appears to have a single x16 PCI Express slot as well as a second slot that goes via the chipset rather than sharing lanes with the primary slot.

[siopao1984]

Moving on to the first of the black PCB motherboards in Gigabyte's 7-series we have the Z77X-UD3H and here we're looking at a pair of x16 slots with a switch for some dual x8 action. There's also a third x16 slot which we presume is connected via four lanes to the chipset. A couple of other additions that the Z77X-UD3H gains is a power button, a POST80 debut LED, an additional SATA controller for a seventh internal SATA port and one eSATA port and interestingly a SATA power connector at the front of the PCB, much like what we've seen on Gigabyte's OC boards. Here we also get a DisplayPort thrown in for good measure in addition to the HDMI, DVI and D-sub connectors.



It appears that Gigabyte has given the UD4 series a miss this time around and instead we're moving straight to the Z77X-UD5H which in essence is the Z77X-UD3H with the addition of some heapipe cooling for the chipset and MOSFETs, a pair of additional SATA 6Gbps ports and a few extra USB 3.0 ports thanks to an unknown third party chipset or two.





If you've been patient (or just skipped past the other boards) we've now reached the models a lot of you have been waiting for, the G1.Sniper 3 and the G1.Sniper M3. The G1.Sniper M3 is Gigabyte's first mATX motherboard focused on gaming and although we'll be honest and say that it's not the most impressive mATX board we've ever seen, it has a pretty decent feature set with three x16 PCI Express slots (two of which are switchable), five SATA ports, one eSATA port, a full set of display connectors and USB 3.0 of course.





The G1.Sniper 3 has no less than four x16 PCI Express slots and appears to have some kind of third party chip to enable this, but it's not clear what this chip is. It also has a total of 10 SATA ports, an mSATA port and the extra SATA power connector. According to Sin's Hardware the new G1.Sniper boards also features Creative's new Sound Core 3D audio chip as well as a yet unannounced revision of Bigfoot's Killer NIC which now appears to be a custom design rather than relying on an FPGA. This should help to vastly reduce the cost of adding a Killer NIC to motherboards. In fact, the G1.Sniper 3 incorporates a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, of which the second appears to be via an Intel chip.



Come Cebit in March we should be able to bring you a lot more details on the upcoming boards from Gigabyte, although we can also tell you that the company is planning on bundling its Bluetooth 4.0/Wi-Fi card with several more models and we might even see some improved versions in the future here.



Source: Gigabyte



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