One of Intel's Chinese partners appear to have ignored Chipzilla's rulings to be quiet about its new 7-series and been showing off a board early.

Wibtek has ignored Intel's restrictions and has shown off its first Z77 based motherboard. Appropriately called the Hacker Z77 the board uses the raygun heatsink idea but other than that it is fairly bog standard with black on dark brown PCB in terms of slot and PCB colours.

The board has 16 power phases for the CPU, although the CPU socket area is quite crowded due in part to the large heatsink. The slot configuration consists of a pair of x16 slots where the second slot operates in x8 mode, a pair of x1 PCI Express slots and two PCI slots. There's a half-size mini PCI Express slot located at the rear of the board which will accept a Wi-Fi card or similar. It sports 10 SATA ports in total, six of them SATA 6Gbps (four via two Marvell controllers) and four are thus SATA 3Gbps.

There are six USB 3.0 ports of which four should be native ports to the Z77 chipset, a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out, an HDMI, DVI and D-sub connector. The additional USB 3.0 ports are the result of using a VLI host controller and there are pin headers for what appears to be four front USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire port. The board also has power, reset and clear CMOS button located at the front.

Board markings suggest that there will me some  SLI and CrossFireX support and with the right CPU the board should support PCI Express 3.0.

More here.