I saw some oddities on Intel Z77 motherboards. First some motherboards ended in K and Intel was claiming they were designed with the k processors in mind; i.e. 2500k. They also mentioned some items only applied to the 3rd generation i5/i7 processors.
RAM:
"1.5V DDR3 SDRAM DIMMs with gold plated contacts, with the option to raise the voltage to support higher performance DDR3 SDRAM DIMMs.
1.35V Low Voltage DDR3 DIMMs (JEDEC specification)
Two independent memory channels with interleaved mode support
Unbuffered, single-sided, or double-sided DIMMs with the following restriction: Does not support double-sided x16 DIMMs.
32 GB maximum total system memory (with 4 Gb memory technology). Minimum recommended total system memory: 1 GB
Non-ECC DIMMs
Serial Presence Detect
DDR3 1600 MHz, DDR3 1333 MHz, and DDR3 1066 MHz SDRAM DIMMs. DDR3 1600 MHz DIMMs are only supported by 3rd generation Intel Core processor family processors.
XMP version 1.3 performance profile support for memory speeds up to 1600 MHz "
So Intel was claiming that they have interleave support for their RAM. Basically you could use 3 sticks of RAM of the same size and it would work in an interleave fashion which might be similar to triple channel RAM. On some of their motherboards they specifically stated they supported both SLI and Crossfire also. Obviously have to have 2 X16 or X8 slots.
I imagine the motherboards with all the bells and whistles are they higher costing motherboards. I was kind of wandering about the "1.35V Low Voltage DDR3 DIMMs (JEDEC specification)"? Then they also explained you could increase the voltage on the 1.5v RAM but did not say what a top limit would be.
I found all of this quite odd for Intel Motherboards, that tend to be very sticky when it comes to keeping to the exact specifications.
Lower Voltage DDR3L RAM.
http://www.jedec.org/news/pressrele...anticipated-ddr3l-low-voltage-memory-standard
Does RAM really use that much power anyway?