ASUS' P8Z77-V Premium Becomes First Intel-certified Thunderbolt Board

[Rob Williams]

We've talked a fair bit about Intel's Thunderbolt connector on the site before, but it's been hard to give an actual opinion on it since its home was on the Mac. Soon, that will change, with ASUS spearheading the PC-based releases with its P8Z77-V Premium motherboard - the first to become Intel-certified. The press release also mentions another model, P8Z77-V PRO/THUNDERBOLT, but doesn't mention whether that's also Intel-certified (nor is it listed on ASUS' official site).

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Kayden]

I would seriously consider this if I ran several external drives and I wanted to keep the performance between my internal and external moderately the same, and reduce the amount of USB ports I'm using. Only problem is that I have one drive that is Sata 3 and that is my SSD for my primary OS. Since I am not using many drives with 6gb throughput there is no reason for me at this time to do this. Now, if I were to creating a server rig from scratch this would be the front runner.

 

[Rob Williams]

When it comes to external storage, that's where eSATA makes all the sense in the world. It's on par with internal SATA, so you are not degrading performance at all. But Thunderbolt is capable of a -lot- more, and would only show its strength when running something like a NAS. If it's just a single HDD, even USB 3.0's capabilities won't be touched, so Thunderbolt is just overkill (you'd be paying extra for a connector when the gains are nil).