The tinted 24pin PSU socket is sexy. Especially good for cable management. 

but still they fail to also do it on the 2x8pin AUX CPU +12v socket. 

Aisde from the native usb3, any other improvements over z68 in these z77 boards?
And why is native usb3 important?

Yeah,with new G.SKILL DDR3 2666 MHz memory.
If he used latest Aida64 beta,we will know mobo type also.

*SIGH* 

it only can be drop down to 1.6GHz and not 1.2GHz.

it still high and not "speed-step" enough.

guys, when will ivy bridge i5 and i7 arrive in malaysia? the replacements for i5 2500k and i7 2600k. need to start building a pc for d3, eventhough d3 can run on c2d

p/s: do you guys think asus x58 sabertooth still available around? coz my old p6t don't have sata3, so pointless to upgrade to ssd, and x58 saber got sata3 port. or i should just ditch the whole system and go for ivy bridge i7 ?

The Lucid Vurtue MVP software is really quite good. I've been able to convert a few movies using quicksync which is extremely useful. I've noticed that certain games also gain an increase in FPS when it's enabled.

A good example is 3DMark 11.

PC @ Stock with Lucid Vurtue MVP ON = P8792
PC @ Stock with Lucid Vurtue MVP OFF = ~P6700

Lucid Vurtue = ON + 5Ghz on 2600K and a mild overclock on the GTX 580 netted me P9651.

So gains are to be had with the technology. More FPS as well as Intel quicksync.

i still don't quite understand virtue and what kind of software actually uses it, any freeware usable with virtu?

Memory overclocking feats over 3000 MHz, aren't new. Last month, we've seen G.Skill and and GIGABYTE achieve a whopping 3736 MHz on the dual-channel AMD "Llano" platform. The duo has now cracked the 3000 MHz mark with four modules, achieving 3077 MHz. The record (>3000 MHz with four modules) was set by Coolaler, using an Intel Core i7-3770K "Ivy Bridge" processor, and GIGABYTE Z77X-UD5H motherboard. The memory of course was four 4 GB G.Skill DDR3-2600 MHz modules. The entire setup was air-cooled.

Gigabyte Z77X-D3H power up last week.
LLC work perfect !! (very stable).
Very SOLID board.
Some BIOS pic:
http://i1.aijaa.com/b/00014/9950572.jpg
http://i10.aijaa.com/b/00676/9950592.jpg
http://i1.aijaa.com/b/00825/9950612.jpg
http://i6.aijaa.com/b/00116/9950629.jpg

Well, today is a day that everyone was expecting, but perhaps not the most exciting day of the month. Today, Intel officially releases the spate of 7-series chipsets for their 3rd generation Core microarchitecture processors (read – Ivy Bridge), despite the actual release of the processors being another three weeks away. This means that today we can actually look at, test, or purchase the range of motherboards that natively support Ivy Bridge. However, we can’t officially publish all the benchmarks for these products using Ivy Bridge until that date three weeks away (to be honest, we are still testing!). So today we are going to have a good in depth look into the Z77 chipset itself, and the review products we have received to let you know what we think looks good. All these boards today will be fully reviewed, warts and all, with Ivy Bridge, as close to official release as possible.

For those who love to fill up all of their DIMM slots (2 DIMM per channel config) running at high speed or mem oc fever
T-Branch goodness

SOS: Asus + Ivy memory treat

Next build:
Ivy bridge 3770k
H100
Asrock Fatality z77
MSI 7970 Lightning
Seasonic-P 1000w Platinum
CM Trooper side panel edition
Agility 3 90GB
Corsair Vengeance 8gb 1600mhz c9
Dell U3011 or maybe 23inch.

Hehe. Anyway, i heard Ivy Bridge only will reach Malaysia around June? 

How is the overclocking ability? I still waiting to see if can overclock better than 2500k. That will be my deciding factor wheter to buy Ivy or not

Intel's USB 3.0 controller remains the fastest overall. It transfers our file sets substantially faster than the A75 in both directions.  The A75's SuperSpeed USB controller is still plenty quick, especially if you're pairing it with a mechanical hard drive rather than the wicked-fast SSD we used for testing. AMD also deserves credit for getting its integrated USB 3.0 solution onto the market more than nine months ahead of Intel. However, the Intel controller appears to have been worth the wait.