 Welcome to my unboxing of the P8Z77V Pro. This is an all new platform from Intel, the Z77 chipset supporting not only second generation, that is Sandy Bridge, Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 processors, but also third generation processors. So that is code name IV Bridge. So these are all Z77 boards have the following traits in common. Actually, I'm going to stick with what all ASUS Z77 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. Second 22 slash 32 nanometer processor support, so that is second and third generation processors. Virtue MVP, this is really cool. Virtue MVP actually has a number of neat 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 I mode. So you can make use of that quick sync technology on the CPU, which allows you to quickly encode 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 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 BIOS 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 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 could 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 managed applications queue, 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. USB 3.0 boost, so true UASP support. Now this is kind of tricky because the Z77 chipset natively supports Intel USB 3.0 ports, so this guy, oh hold on, one of these two front ones is going to be an Intel USB 3.0 port, set of ports, and then two of these rear ones are going to be our, 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 ASMedia, and then two ports for the back are going to be ASMedia, so the Intel ports are going to over time have the advantage probably of more general wider compatibility due to it being Intel and they validated everything to death, but ASMedia has the advantage of supporting UASP, so with an compatible device you can get dramatically better performance out of the ASMedia ports. So ASUS gives you the option, use this and this, or use this and this, whatever you decide you will get the best possible balance. Precise power control, so as I mentioned before this is their eighth generation, this is a fully digitally powered board. Now what's cool about what ASUS 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 lower end boards they are still going to be using 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 saber tooth or an ROG board to get digital power control for your integrated GPU, which you are in all likelihood not using. Now ASUS has moved those features down with the trickle down effect to the boards that really need it. Finally WiFi Go, so this particular one comes with a WiFi 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, WiFi connectivity everywhere, yep, so you can stream to your iPad, to your phone, other DLNA devices, very cool. You know what, if you guys are curious about TPU you should probably check out my round up of pre-canned overclocking utilities. So you can either use the TPU button to get an automatic overclock, although I wouldn't recommend that because 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 these one button utilities cannot do. Let me just see if I've missed anything else on the back here. FanExpert 2 is really cool, so you can set user definable, sorry about that, you can set user definable curves so that 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 AHCI mode by default because so many users are like, oh my new SSD doesn't perform very good, it's like, well you're running in IDE mode, what can we do for you? And once you've installed the OS onto an IDE mode drive, it's a bit of a bear to get it changed around to AHCI mode. Here's the WiFi Go card user guide including various things such as access point mode, the WiFi engine, WiFi Go, the movable, omnidirectional antenna. We've got the user guide as well as the drivers and utilities disk which you should ignore and download the latest off the Asus 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 what not. We have a WiFi module here which unfortunately I was traveling recently and I forgot to put my knife back on my keychain, I don't know how I'm going to get this open guys. Nevermind, 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. Presumably there's an antenna that I missed, yep, okay, more accessories, sorry about that guys. So then there's the movable and this is cool because it has magnets on the bottom of it so you can actually position it wherever you want. 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. I.O. shield, rear eSATA as well as USB 2 just if you want some extra ports back there, two SATA 3.6 gigabit per second cables, two SATA 2.3 gigabit 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 gonna go pretty quickly on the overview. Asus has actually got a really cool heatsink design. I'm always sort of, you know, I'm always interested to see what they have. My favorite is still the, I think I called it fortress of solitude design that they had on their P55 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 chipset heatsink. And I mean mostly these heatsinks are for decoration, these CPUs on this platform aren't gonna pull a ton 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 LGA1155 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 megahertz JDEC specifications so that means if you have JDEC modules that is like bone stock modules that run at 1600 megahertz they'll work completely zero configuration in these boards. Here's the memo K button so that allows you to post pretty much no matter what kind of memory you got in there. You've also got a 24 pin power connector and the 8 pin power connector in 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 gigabit per second ports. Included SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second ports as well as two other SATA 3, 6 gigabit 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 headers, front panel USB 3, front panel audio as well as moving along here. Ah yes, ports. Let's talk ports. We have two PCIe 1x slots, three PCIe 16x slots although this guy is really only good for PCIe 4x and this guy is really only good for PCIe 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. Ah oh yes, fan headers. So you can use ASUS' software in order to control these fan headers. We have one, two, three, four, five, should be six. Where's the last one? Six. Ah four pin PWM fan headers and we can set all kinds of cool curves. I believe it's fan headers one to four that you can actually use to use the auto 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 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 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 not for decoration as well as little quality touches like installing the chipset heatsink using screws rather than push pins. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the P8Z77V Pro. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips 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 ports on this motherboard even when the system is powered off. And one other 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.