Of course it is very unrealistic that all drives will require that ~1.75A all at once (there will be minor time differences when the drives will start up), but it can happen all at once and in that case you could run out of power. Personally my server with 12 hard drives (WD greens and reds) runs up to 160W from the socket at startup, but because my power meter does "refresh" only once or twice in a second i could be missing power spikes much higher than that value.

Peak power usage of WD20NPVT is 1A, so that could be a better solution if you can live with the choice of more expensive 2.5" drives. It would probably even start on USB3 power alone (0.9A).

Thanks for the actual measurement of the 12 WD drives in your system. If no higher spikes are hidden in this measure, the power draw is not bad at all, and it even includes your CPU, motherboard etc. Probably the power supply also has some capacitors capable of handling intermittent peaks of short duration.

Has anyone tried using the i5-3475S CPU with the DQ77KB? It seems like a perfect fit, 65W, 4 cores, VT-d, vPro and HD4000. Price is much lower than the i7-3770S, and I suppose many people wouldn't mind the lack of 2 MB L3 cache, 200 MHz or Hyper-Threading.

I wanted to add that I'm running this motherboard right now with the following components:

* 95W universal laptop power supply (Thermaltake?)

* Intel Xeon E3-1265L V2 CPU

* Mushkin MKNSSDAT240GB-DX mSATA SSD mounted on-board

* 4x Samsung HD204UI 2TB hard drives

* Intake and outlet 120mm case fans (large heatsink on CPU)

I have had no issues with power spikes with drives booting up, etc.

I've had a bit of trouble with this board and my PCIe TV tuner... Is anyone else utilising the PCIe slot without problems? (my card is only detected around half the time - in the BIOS and the OS)

Specs:
- Intel Core i3 3220
- Intel DQ77KB (0051 BIOS)
- Hauppauge HVR-2200 dual DVB-T tuner
- Antec ISK-300
- Thermaltake ToughPower variable voltage AC-DC transformer (set to 19V)
- 120GB Samsung 840
- Windows 7 (and Ubuntu, problem is OS independant)

I've been back and forth with Intel but they think the board is fine, as the same slot works ok with a PCIe wifi card

Nice review and some interesting comments.

How strict is the 65W TDP limit? I'd really like to use one of the 77W TDP Xeon V2s. Strikes me as strange that Intel designed this board to rule out all but the slowest of their Xeon V2s.

Also, does anyone know if the eDP (embedded DisplayPort) can be used together with the rear panel DisplayPort output, to be able to drive two DisplayPort monitors with this board?

Great review... I am building an HTPC with the smallest form-factor I can... my requirements are as follows:
* playback encoded 1080p MKV content
* digital audio output via SPDIF
* HDMI video output (or DVI)

My only question about this board is about the SPDIF... is the 3.5mm jack on the back SPDIF? Is there anyone that is able to test with a 3.5mm mini-toslink to toslink adapter? Can it output DTS for example?

It's pretty clear from the documentation that the two 3.5mm jacks are stereo analog out (green) and microphone in (pink).

Been using this motherboard since last November with a dell 65w laptop power adapter, i3-3225, 240GB intel SSD, W8pro, 2x4GB ram. Have it installed in a Lian-li Q16b (couldn't find a Q05b instock when i ordered it), unfortunately the case powersupply and intel stock cooler don't fit togeather so i have a small case with alot of empty space in it, tempted to get smaller case for it. Been also folding with it pretty much 24x7 since January and temperatures have been under 50 with stock cooler. Mainly use the system for movies, browsing, Team Fortress 2 and Gamecube emulator.

Also using a notebook Kingston HyperX 8GB 1866MHz PnP Memory Kit with it. Bios will report the 1866 speed but seems to limit it to 1600 with no ability to change it, odd cause they work great in my Thinkpad x230.

I have had issues with one of the ethernet connections, system is kept on 24x7 and about once a month it'll lose it's connection and needs a reboot to restore it. Not sure if this is a driver issue or not. Still occurs with latest bios.