Intel DZ77GA-70K and Core i7-3770K Review

Up Close - The DZ77GA-70K

Considering that this is the reference board from which all others will be taken, it's actually a good looker too. The dark blue and black colour combination works well and the two big heatsinks are nicely designed with a lovely mix between the aesthetics and function.

Starting in the bottom right hand corner we have the usual array of USB headers, as well as a diagnostic 7 segment display and the Winbond W83677HG-i to handle all the hardware monitoring functions.

PCI slots are well covered with two PCI Express 3.0 16x/8x for the GPU, as well as 1 PCI-E x4, two PCI-E x1 and a couple of standard PCIs. PCI-Express 3.0 is supported by the 3rd Generation CPU, so we should finally get to see if the PCI-E 2.0 GPUs have any benefit from the extra bandwidth. Below the bottom PCI-E x1 slot is a bank of LEDs which also assist in diagnosing any errors. The far left one blinks blue when the CPU is accessed, which on our open test bench means it's annoyingly always blinking.

The layout of the DZ77GA-70K is particularly pleasing with everything being where you'd require it, and nothing is too tucked away. We've lost count of the amount of motherboards that have the 8pin ATX power socket in a finger-slicing place, so it's nice to see it right on the edge of the board here.

Round the back we have all the options you could ever wish for. 4 USB 3.0 ports, a Firewire, 4 USB 2.0, dual Gigabit LAN, BIOS recovery button, HDMI and 7.1 Audio. Storage is provided for by four SATA 6Gb/s ports (grey and blue) and four SATA 3Gb/s. These support Intel Rapid Storage Technology and RAID 0,1,5 and 10.