By raising voltage to 1.889 Volts, using 63x multiplier and 112.11 MHz and using dry ice - the 22nm beast passed 7000 MHz.

Chinese online marketplace site Taobao has listings of two yet-to-launch motherboards based on the Intel Z77 Express chipset, the Wibtek Z77 Hacker (we earlier covered news of that listing in early January) and now, the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe. This will be among ASUS' premium LGA1155 motherboards based on the new chipset. It is priced at 2,499 RMB (US $396), which seems overpriced. The seller is probably looking to make a quick Mao with pre-launch orders. The seller was kind enough to paste ASUS' marketing poster for the P8Z77-V Deluxe, which can typically also be found on the back side of product packaging.

The P8Z77-V Deluxe supports DDR3-2800 MHz with overclocking. Expansion slots include two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (x8/x8 when both are populated), wired to the CPU, supporting NVIDIA SLI, AMD CrossFire and Lucid VirtuMVP; one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (electrical x4, wired to the PCH); and four PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots. Good riddance to legacy PCI. Display connectivity lacks archaic connectors such as DVI and D-Sub, includes HDMI and DisplayPort, instead. Storage connectivity consists of four SATA 6 Gb/s (two from the PCH, two from a third-party controller), four SATA 3 Gb/s, and two eSATA 6 Gb/s.

Other connectivity includes two gigabit Ethernet interfaces (one driven by Intel 82579V, one by Realtek RTL8111F PHY); Wireless b/g/n (quad-band); Bluetooth 3.0; 8+2 channel HD audio (Realtek ALC898 HDA CODEC); 8 USB 3.0 ports (six on the rear panel, two via front-panel header); and 8 USB 2.0 ports. There are several ASUS-exclusives to be had, such as its UEFI BIOS with EZMode, EPU, TurboV Processing Unit (TPU), etc.

“It’s just a warm-up. We are working on some faster memory kits and they will be released soon. It’s going to be an exciting time” said Paul Chen, senior R&D manager at G.Skill.