welcome to my unboxing of the p8 z77 V
Pro this is an all new platform from Intel the z77 chipset supporting not
only second generation that is sandybridge core I3 Core i5 and core i7
processors but also third generation
processor so that is code named ivybridge so these are all these 77
boards have the following traits in common actually I'm going to stick with
what all ausi 77 boards have because not all of them have things like the Dual
intelligent processors that is for Energy Efficiency or for performance as
well as their smart Digi plus which is their eighth generation of digital vrm
so they are all PCIe 3.0 ready they all
have support for Crossfire X and then
the certified boards have support for NVIDIA SLI okay second 22/32 NM
processor support so that is uh second and third generation processors virtue
MVP this is really cool virtue MVP actually has a number of need effects so
one is it can actually boost your performance two is it can reduce tearing
in scenarios where your frame rate goes
above the actual refresh rate of the Monitor and finally it no longer
requires you to plug the cable into a specific Outlet in order to switch
between D mode and IM mode so you can make use of that quicksync technology on
the CPU which allows you to quickly code video without sacrificing gaming
performance okay moving on down we've got Intel smart response technology
which allows you to use an SSD as a cache to uh boost up the performance of
your boot drive as well as moving over here aha this is awesome USB BIOS
flashback easy BIOS flashback this is a killer feature because basically it
allows you to no matter what you do to your motherboard recover it quickly and
easily just by loading a iOS file onto a USB drive throwing it in the back of the
board and pressing you know what I'm just going to show you guys pressing
the where'd it
go yeah I found it guys normally it's here so I was expecting to show you guys
the button that you press but uh actually on this particular board it's
down here doesn't make much of a difference it's not something you'll be using very often knock on wood but it's
there and it's super handy because you don't even have to have a CPU or memory
installed in order to recover your BIOS thumbs up because it could save you an
RMA which can be up to a week of downtime without your system moving on
we have their Network eye control which the coolest feature in the network eye
control is actually the ability to prioritize various applications it's
pretty easy to set up in the AI Suite so all you do is take any network using
applications you bump them up into the
sort of the the managed applications cue and then you just click on the priority
in order to set them to high medium or low so that's really neat as well uh
usb3 boost so true uasp support now this
is kind of tricky because the z77 chipset natively supports Intel usb3
Port so this guy oh hold on one of these two front ones is going to be an
Intel usb3 Port uh set of ports and then
two of these rear ones are going to be are okay hold on one header for the
front will be Intel two ports for the
back will be Intel one header for the front is going to be as media and then
two ports for the back are going to be as media so the Intel ports are going to
over time have the advantage probably of you know more General wider
compatibility due to it being Intel and they validate everything to death but as
media has the advantage of supporting uasp so with an compatible device you
can get dramatically better performance out of the as media ports so seus gives
you the option use this and this or use
this and this whatever you decide you will get the best possible
balance uh precise power control so as I mentioned before this is their eighth
generation uh this is a fully digitally
powered board now what's cool about what asusa has done with their z77 boards is
they're actually moving away from using different types of pwm designs
throughout their lineup so this is a pro level board this is a fairly High tier
board but even on their low boards they are still going to be using digit
digital power for the CPU the memory as well as the integrated GPU So Gone are
the days when you have to buy a Deluxe level board or a sabertooth or an Rog
board to get digital power control for your integrated GPU which you are in all
likelihood not using no ASUS has moved those features down with a trickle down
effect to the boards that really need it finally Wi-Fi go so this particular one
comes with a Wi-Fi module which can actually be used not only to access your
wireless network but also to stream media to supported DLNA devices as well
as use your motherboard as an AP so as an access point for networking so DLNA
media hub got that covered Wi-Fi connectivity everywhere yep so you can
stream to your iPad to your phone other DLNA devices very cool um you know what
if you guys are curious about TPU you should probably check out my my Roundup
of preann over clocking utilities so you
can either use the TPU button to get an automatic overclock although I wouldn't
recommend that because the uh the aggressive mode in their AI Suite the
most extreme mode allows it to tune itself find the sweet spot for your CPU
and really Max it out in a way that uh these these one button utilities cannot
do let me just see if I've missed anything else on the back here fan
expert 2 is really cool so you can set user
definable sorry about that you can set user definable curves so that uh you
basically tell it what temperatures you want it to run at what RPMs also
provides an RPM fixed mode as well as an
automatic fan speed detection mode which allows you to basically just more
intelligently figure out what exactly you want to do as far as balancing your
fan speed and your cooling goes here we go so we got support for HDMI 1.4 which
means 3D very cool SATA mode notice are
configured to ahci mode by default thank you ASUS it is about time more
motherboard manufacturers started moving to HCI mode by default because so many
users are like oh my new SSD it doesn't perform very good it's like well you're
running an IDE mode what can we do for you and once you once you've installed
the OS onto an ID mode drive it's a bit of a bear to get it changed around to
ahci mode here's the Wi-Fi go-kart user
guide including various things such as access point mode the Wi-Fi engine Wi-Fi
go the movable omnidirectional antenna
all right we've got the user guide as well as the drivers and utilities disc
which you should ignore and download the latest off the exus website we've got an
SLI cable we've got the Q connectors so
these are to more easily plug in your front ports including front USB 2 as
well as your front panel connectors such as your power and whatnot uh we have
okay a Wi-Fi module here which unfortunately I was traveling recently
and I forgot to uh put my knife back on my keychain I don't know how I'm going
to get this open guys never mind we're good slick was going to
turn off the camera for me mercifully but I didn't end up needing it so there's the
module and presumably there's an antenna that I missed yep okay more accessories
sorry about that guys uh so then there's a movable and this is cool because it
has magnets on the bottom of it so you can actually position it wherever you
want uh it looks like he's moved the one that was on my test bench before but I
had it just like bolted to the side of the power supply actually here oh that
didn't work oh that's too bad because okay just the
wires here but yeah you can stick it to anything metal IO
Shield rear uh a rear e SATA as well as
USB 2 just if you want some extra ports back there two SATA 36 GB per second
cables two SATA 2 3 GB per second cables these are all straight to right angle
and finally the board itself so we've covered most of the features so we're
going to go pretty quickly on the overview ASUS has actually got a really
cool heat snc design I'm always sort of you know I'm always interested to see
what they have my favorite is still the uh I think I called it Fortress of
Solitude design that they had on their p-55 boards I really liked that but this
one's pretty good too it's very new age and digital like it kind of looks like a
city sort of thing I think it looks kind of neat and then this one is matching
down here so that's your uh your chipset heat sink I mean mostly these heat sinks
are for decoration these CPUs on this platform aren't going to pull a 10 of
power I shouldn't say they're for decoration we do still need to cool the
vrm but we're not talking you know an x79 platform where you got a six core
CPU or anything like that this will be a four core CPU platform here is our
digital power delivery as well as our LGA 1155 socket so be careful when
you're installing it and don't try and install an 1156 CPU I remember when all
of them came with warnings about that and right support out of the box for
second generation and third generation CPUs dual Channel DDR3 is over here this
is another cool thing about z77 boards is they support the DDR3 1600 MHz jde
specification so that means if you have jde modules that is like bone stock
modules that run at 1600 MHz they'll work completely zero configuration in
these boards here's the uh the memo K button so that allows you to post pretty
much no matter what kind of memory you gotten there um you've also got a 24 pin
power connector and the 8 Pin power connector and their ideal locations along the right hand Edge in the top
left front USB 3.0 Port we kind of already harped on that included SATA 2 3
GB per second ports included SATA 36 GB
per second ports as well as two other SATA 36 GB per second ports so two of
these are running off of the Intel chipset for these ports ASUS is using an
as media controller which while it doesn't support their SSD caching that
we've seen on previous generation products it is slightly faster than the
controller that does support the caching we got our epu as well as our
TPU buttons remember this is for Energy Efficiency this is for Extreme
Performance front panel connectors four front USB 2.0 uh headers front uh front
panel USB 3 uh front panel audio as well
as moving along here ah yes ports let's talk ports so we have two PCIe 1X slots
three PCI e6x slots although this guy is really only good for PCI e4x and this
guy is really only good for PCI E 8X although bear in mind PCIe 3.0 8X is the
same bandwidth as PCIe 2.0 16x so even
if you're running two high-end graphics cards in here you're going to have
plenty of bandwidth two Legacy PCI ports round out the seven slots that are
available uh oh yes fan headers so you
can use ASUS's software in order to control these fan headers we have 1 2 3
four five should be six where's the last one six uh four pin pwm fan headers and
we can set all kinds of cool curves I believe it's uh fan headers 1 to four
that you can actually use to um use the autot tuning software for on the back we
find a PS2 Port that's for keyboard or Mouse I still like to see these we've
got uh four USB 3.0 ports two USB 2.0
ports optical audio out HDMI DisplayPort VGA and DVI are all included Intel
Ethernet that's how they're able to have that uh that packet sorting included on
all of their z77 boards as well as 7.1
audio out on the back of the board we find a little bit of extra cooling for
the vrm that's definitely Ely not for decoration as well as little quality
touches like installing the chipset heat sink using screws rather than push pins
so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the p8 z77 V
Pro don't forget to subscribe to lius techtips for more unboxings reviews and
other computer videos and last but not least USB charger plus allows you to
quickly charge your devices plugged into the USB 3 or the USB ports on this
motherboard even when the system is powered
off and one of thing I pretty much
forgot is the Thunderbolt header so ASUS
is going to have available for their full line of z77 boards with the
exception of I believe the Ws board a
PCIe 4X Riser card that you can install in here and then run a little cable over
to the TB header so you can add Thunderbolt compatibility to your board
for a very reasonable charge if you have a Thunderbolt ready device that you want
to use