When it comes to mini-ITX motherboards, Zotac has built itself quite a reputation, but as far as ATX models go, Zotac seems to have mostly kept out away. Now the company is looking set to actually launch a full-size Z77 motherboard in the shape of the ZT-Z77 Crown-U1D which shares quite a lot with the ZT-Z68 Crown Edition-U1DU3 which the company previewed last year, but it never made it into the market as far as we know.The most obvious parts that were carried over to the ZT-Z77 Crown-U1D from the Z68 model is the 24-phase PWM with DrMOS, tantalum capacitor and a decoupling capacitor, although this time around Zotac has gone for a U-shaped layout of the PWM which means it takes up a little bit less space on the motherboard. Part of the reason for this is the removal of the nf200 chip which has cleared up a fair bit of PCB space. This time around though a second decoupling capacitor has been added to the memory power regulation, although we’re not entirely sure how much of a difference this will make.
A lot of features that were present on the ZT-Z68 Crown Edition-U1DU3 are missing on the ZT-Z77 Crown-U1D, such as the lack of an mSATA/mini PCI Express slot, a couple of missing SATA ports, what appears to be a single BIOS instead of three, and potentially worst of all, at least for gamers, only two x16 PCI Express slots. That said, at least the current slot configuration isn’t terrible, if a bit unusual with two x16 PCI Express 3.0 slots which operate in dual x8 mode when both are in use, as well as four x1 PCI Express slot.
What’s left is the half-size mini PCI Express slot which hold a Wi-Fi card, two internal headers for four USB 3.0 ports of which two are via a Renesas µPD720202 host controller, two headers for four USB 2.0 ports, the standard set of six SATA ports via the chipset, power, reset and clear CMOS buttons, a POST80 debug LED and Voltage readout points for the CPU, chipset and memory.
The rear I/O of the ZT-Z77 Crown-U1D is remarkably similar to that of the ZT-Z68 Crown Edition-U1DU3, although some minor changes have taken place here too. There’s a single PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out, a DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI connector and of course two antenna points for the Wi-Fi card. What’s missing is an eSATA port, which isn’t a major omission.Apparently Zotac isn’t planning on selling the ZT-Z77 Crown-U1D outside of China for the time being and it’s not clear when the board will be available, or what it’ll sell for. Then again, the company did announce a couple of new ITX motherboard which will cover in a separate news post and they will be available worldwide.Source: PConline.com.cn

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