ECS Announces Two New Z77 Motherboards

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With the launch of the “Ivy Bridge” generation of Intel Core processors growing nearer by the day, we are seeing more and more manufacturers flaunting their goods. The latest manufacturer to join the party is ECS, with the announcement of two new motherboards based on the Intel Z77 chipset for the 22 nm third generation of Intel Core processors, codenamed “Ivy Bridge”.

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The two boards in question are the Z77H2-AX and the Z77H2-A2X. On the surface these boards look nearly identical, with both sporting more gold than your average jewelry shop. Everything has been given a touch of gold, from capacitors to the rear panel connectors and even the CPU socket. However, if you take a deeper look, you’ll see that the two boards are actually quite different.

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While both offer full support for the third generation “Ivy Bridge” Core family of processors, four DDR3 memory slots, D-Sub and HDMI video outputs, integrated Wifi and Bluetooth, Lucid Virtu/Nvidia SLI/AMD CrossFire support, there are several large differences. While the A2X offers two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots, the AX offers three; and while the A2X offers four SATA 6Gb/s ports, the AX offers six. The AX also offers a larger heatsink which comes around below the CPU as well as to the side and top. Both boards have onboard power and reset boards, as well as a LED-segment display for POST codes.

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