Relatively unknown Chinese motherboard manufacturer Wibtek is entering the high-end LGA1155 market in the Far East with their Intel Z77 “Panther Point” based “Hacker Z77″ motherboard. Despite being unknown in the western world, Wibtek is one of the top five motherboard manufacturers by volume with over ten million units shipped in 2010. The Hacker Z77 has out-of-the-box support for Intel’s next generation of LGA1155 based Core i-series processors based on the 22 nm process, codenamed “Ivy Bridge”, as well as support for all existing LGA1155 processors.

The Hacker Z77′s LGA1155 socket is fed power by a 16-phase VRM, and has four DDR3 DIMM slots with dual channel RAM support at its disposal. Expansion slots include two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots which drop down to x8/x8 when both are populated, two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 slots and two legacy PCI slots – something more and more manufacturers are dropping.