Event Coverage

Gigabyte's Intel X79 & AMD Llano Motherboards Sighted @ Computex 2011

By Vijay Anand - 30 May 2011

Intel X79 Mobo Sighted!

Intel X79 Mobo Sighted!

Computex 2011 hasn't even officially started yet and we've managed to get a few important sightings - motherboards based on the Intel X79 chipset and boards for the upcoming AMD Llano CPUs. While Gigabyte's booth was still a work in progress, thankfully, their product display was ready enough for photo taking.

In short, here are the main tidbits - it has a huge LGA2011 socket for Sandy Bridge-E CPUs, support for quad-channel DDR3 memory and the next generation PCI Express version 3.0.

Our very first sighting of an Intel X79 motherboard - courtesy of Gigabyte. Named the GA-X79-UD3, it doesn't sound like the board is a very high-end model. However the CPU that sits within surely is high-end. Note the interesting DIMM array separation - Sandy Bridge-E processors support quad-channel memory!

That mean, each of the four DIMM slots on this board is matched with a corresponding memory channel on the upcoming Sandy Bridge-E monster processor. We do literally mean "monster" since this processor requires a brand new LGA2011 socket which is physically a lot larger than what we've seen for consumer CPUs. Despite its bulky look, it's supposed to be compatible with LGA1366 coolers.

Here's another shot of it with the rear-I/O in view.

Full motherboard details.

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