At a pre-CES press event on Monday, Gigabyte lifted the curtain off its line of 7-series motherboards. The boards are all tailored for Intel’s 22-nm Ivy Bridge processors, with LGA1155 sockets and PCI Express 3.0 connectivity.
The GI.Sniper 3 and pint-sized GI.Sniper M3 crown the lineup. The former is the highest-end model, which Gigabyte says features an integrated Killer NIC 2201 network controller from Qualcomm coupled with a second Gigabit Ethernet chip from Intel. (Yes, the Killer NIC is now a Qualcomm product—the firm acquired Bigfoot Networks about four months ago.) Gigabyte didn’t divulge chipset model numbers, but we suspect both GI.Sniper variants are based on the upcoming Intel Z77 Express. They both have onboard audio from Creative, too.
Down the line are the GA-Z77X-UD5H and GA-Z77X-U35H, which both support two-way SLI and CrossFire configs. They feature onboard mSATA connectors for mini SSDs, as well. The model numbers leave no doubt here—Z77 Express chipsets surely lurk beneath those heatsinks.
Gigabyte has also unveiled the B75M-D3H. Enthusiasts probably won’t find this model particularly interesting, but IT admins might. Gigabyte says this is a business board with remote management features.
Check out the image gallery below for high-resolution versions of the pictures above.