3/06/2012 06:03:00 PM
dannzfay
At this year’s CeBIT 2012 fair, motherboard makers have presented a wide range of LGA 1155 solutions based on the upcoming Z77 Express chipset, but few of these are more feature rich than MSI’s Z77A-GD80 which comes with support for Intel’s Thunderbolt interconnect.
The layout of the board presented by MSI today greatly resembles the prototype showcased at CES 2012, but in the meantime it has also received the addition of some black and blue heatsinks.
These cover the motherboard’s 22-phase VRM as well as the Intel Z77 chipset, and feature a low-profile design, so they won’t interfere with long graphics cards or third-party CPU coolers.
Moving to the expansion options available in the Z77A-GD80, MSI has installed the usual three PCI Express x16 slots (two of these are PCIe Gen 3.0 and SLI/CrossFireX complaint) as well as four PCIe x1 slots.
Four DIMM sockets, which support up to 32GB of DDR3 memory working at 2666MHz data rate, are also present while on the bottom edge MSI has placed eight SATA ports, four of these coming with support for 6Gbps drives.
Other features include a total of four USB 3.0 ports (two via an on-board header), DisplayPort, HDMI and D-Sub video outputs, THX TruStudio Pro audio, and Military Class III components.
As is the case with all of MSI’s high-end motherboard, the Z77A-GD80 also includes V-Check Probes, OC Genie II auto overclocking, on-board Power and Reset buttons, multi BIOS support and a rear Clear CMOS switch.
No details regarding the pricing or the release date of the MSI Z77A-GD80 are available at this time, but the presence of a Thunderbolt controller should add between $20 and $30 on average to the final price of the motherboard.
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