Gigabyte Makes Mini-ITX 7-Series Motherboards Official, Pictured
Good news for the SFF (small form factor) market – GIGABYTE todays unveiled their Intel 7-series Mini-ITX (17cm by 17cm) motherboards supporting Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors. The two boards, named the GA-Z77N-WiFi and GA-Z77N-WiFi using the H77 and Z77 chipsets respectively, are identical in all respects other than the chipset used.
The duo of boards offer two DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting up to 16 GB of DDR3-1600 memory in dual channel operation. Video output is taken care of by two HDMI and one DVI output, with resolution limited to 1920×1200 by the lack of a DisplayPort output. Furthering this board’s stance in the HTPC market is the Realtek-driven 7.1 audio output which, along with analogue outputs, also offers a TOSLINK optical S/PDIF output.
The back I/O panel also includes two USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports, two Realtek-driven Ethernet ports, two antenna connectors for the 802.11 b/g/n WiFi card which sits in a standard half-size mini PCI Express slot and a single shared keyboard/mouse PS/2 port. Internally, headers are provided for a further two each USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports and a PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot for a dedicated graphics card. Storage is taken care of by two SATA 3Gb/s and two SATA 6 Gb/s ports, supporting RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5 across all four ports. The SATA ports also support Intel’s Smart Response Technology for SSD caching. Sources — GIGABYTE GA-H77N-WiFi, GIGABYTE GA-Z77N-WiFi
