Posted 04/06/2012 | by Brad Chacos



"Finally, now the meat of the systems are starting to come out," Maximum PC reader I Jedi exhaled in the comments of our earlier article about the new Biostar TZ77XE4 Motherboard. If he only knew how right he was: since the Biostar news went live, a bevy of companies have announced new 7-series-supporting mobos of their own, including ASRock, MSI and Gigabyte.

All of the Z77 boards rock the LGA 1155 socket and come compatible with both the existing Sandy Bridge and upcoming Ivy Bridge chips. As Paul said earlier, though, Sandy Bridge-E chips use socket 2011 and won't work so well -- and by that, we mean at all -- if you try to cram one into an Ivy Bridge mobo. These motherboards and the upcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs support the speedy 6Gbps PCI-E 3.0 standard.

Every manufacturer puts its own spin on things, of course, to try and separate themselves from the cloud, and today's announcement are no different. Amongst other things, Gigabyte's Z77 boards include a dual UEFI BIOS and an "All Digital" power controller design; MSI's offerings rock a OC Genie II overclocking button and class III military grade components; and ASRock's Ivy Bridge boards sport performance-boosting XFast RAM, XFast LAN and XFast USB technologies. Hit those links for press releases containing plenty more details about the 7-series boards from each manufacturer.

Being flooded with Ivy Bridge mobos makes it feel like the rumors that Ivy Bridge is supposed to launch on the 29th of this month are true, eh? Note, however, that none of those press releases mention any prices or release dates.