The Board - Layout

The ASUS P8Z77-V is a fairly standard ASUS product, featuring a color scheme that has been used for the "mainstream" boards for quite some time now. With a fanless cooling design, the multiple shades of blue used in the slots continues into the heatsinks themselves, providing a nice look that easily matches for color-coordinated builds. The rear of the board is actually quite busy, with numerous voltage regulation bits all over the place around the socket.


The front of the board around the socket is pretty busy as well, with several capacitors sitting very close to the socket, which may make insulation for sub-zero cooling quite difficult. The back of the socket sees a couple of blue metal plates covering some MOSFETs for the CPUs VRM.


The ASUS P8Z77-V has seven slots, three of which are PCIe x16 slots, two PCIe x1 slots, and two PCI slots. It's nice to see that both a PCI and PCIe x1 slot are available when dual-slot VGAs are installed into all PCIe slots. There are four DIMM slots, each supporting up to 8 GB DIMMs, giving the ASUS P8Z77-V a total memory capacity of 32 gigabytes.


The pin headers found on the bottom edge of the board is rather simple, with just audio and a TPM header found on the left side, while the right side has four USB 2.0 headers along with a Thunderbolt header and the front panel pin block. There are a total of five fan headers on the ASUS P8Z77-V, each of which is 4-pin PWM-based.


The rear I/O panel starts of on the left with a combo keyboard/mouse PS/2 connector, sitting above dual USB 3.0 ports. Next to that are the only two USB 2.0 ports, followed by the antenna for the Wi-Fi GO! card. There are four display outputs, with HDMI and DisplayPort found long with an optical digital audio output, next to which sits a VGA and a DVI-D port. Wrapping up is the RJ-45 port on top of two more USB 3.0 ports, followed by the analogue audio tower, with six jacks. For internal SATA connectivity we find eight ports, four of which are SATA 3 Gb/s, connected to the Intel Z77 Express PCH (light blue), and the remaining four are SATA 6 Gb/s, two connected to the Intel PCH (white), and two provided via an external controller (dark blue).