Although the Intel Z77 Express chipset has been available for a while now we chose to wait until the official launch of Ivy Bridge to begin our reviews. After all the Z77 with Panther Point was designed to get the best performance when tied with Ivy Bridge so why not show that off first. To kick off our coverage of the Z77 we deiced to try out Intel’s reference design in the DZ77GA-70K. This performance desktop board from Intel is a great starting point and will give us the feel of how Intel meant things to work. So let’s get to it shall we?
The Box and Goodies - Intel’s boxes are usually very clean (bordering on plain) you have the electric skull on the front that has been with us since the times of the skulltrail platform (which were very fun to test out). You get a few of the typical badges and logos along with a short listing of the DZ77GA-70K’s features.
The back of the box has more to offer and goes into some specifics about what you get as well as a nice image of the board with the major components/features detailed.
Inside the box you will get a front USB 3.0 panel, a wireless/Bluetooth module (that plugs into an on-board USB header), a mouse pad, the I/O shield, quick start guide as well as a drivers DVD and manual. Our box did not contain these items (so they are not pictured here), but we were able to get them direct from Intel. That is really all that there is to the packaging so let’s move onto to the motherboard and see what it has to offer.
