CeBit 2012 has been flooded with motherboards from the likes of Gigabyte, ASRock, Biostar, MSI, ECS and ASUS. EVGA decided to take a more low key approach and not showcase anything at CeBit 2012. Only yesterday did they release something about a single upcoming Z77 motherboard. Obviously EVGA will be announcing more than one motherboard at the Z77 launch but they have only decided to let us have a look at one which you can see below:
EVGA did not specify what model this is, but it does look like it will probably go on to be the EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard. Being Z77 it will have natural 22nm Ivy Bridge support along with four DDR3 DIMM slots that probably support 8GB modules at overclocked speeds in excess of 2000MHz. There is a 10 phase VRM for the CPU and1 phase VRM for the RAM slots. The processor gets given two 8 pin EPS power connectors which seems like overkill to us as each 8 Pin EPS power connector can deliver up to 336W of power depending on your power supply but it brings hope of the potentially overclocking ability Ivy Bridge can deliver.
The PCI-E lanes also get extra power in the form of a 6 pin in the bottom left of the board and another 6 pin above the first PCI-E lane. There is a PCI-E bridge chip to provide extra PCI-E lanes and there are five PCI-E 16X lanes of which at least two of them should be PCI-E 3.0 to support the Gen 3 capabilities of Ivy Bridge. There will be SLI and CrossFireX capabilties although we aren’t sure by how many, there are enough lanes and spaces for four graphics cards.
It also includes PCIe disable switches, a debug LED, an angled 24-pin ATX power connector, four SATA 6.0 Gbps and four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, Gigabit Ethernet, an undetermined number of USB 3.0 ports, Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons, 7.1 channel audio, and it seems even a Thunderbolt port.
Source: TPU
