Gigabyte's Intel X79 & AMD Llano Motherboards Sighted @ Computex 2011
Computex doesn't start till tomorrow but over at Gigabyte's booth that's still under construction, we managed to catch hold our first glimpses of motherboards based on the Intel X79 chipset for Sandy Bridge-E CPUs and AMD Llano CPUs. Check these out and more!
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.
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.
Full motherboard details.
AMD Llano Mobos Sighted!
The Gigabyte GA-A75M-UD2H is our first encounter with an AMD Llano CPU based motherboard. As you should know by now, the Llano is a Fusion based processor and is a step-up from the current Brazos platform that feature either the Ontario or Zacate APUs. Llano will have a more powerful CPU processing engine a better graphics engine (Radeon HD 65xx) class - great for mainstream needs. Sporting the FM1 socket, this micro-ATX board comes with a host of Gigabyte-centric features.
Here's the full specs list.
For those who prefer more expansion options, here's a standard ATX edition called the GA-A75-UD4H. Apart from more PCIe, PCI, SATA and USB ports, little else is different from the above UD2H model above.
Other New AMD Mobos - AMD 990FX, AMD 970
We recently covered a handful of upcoming AMD 990FX boards - the latest and the highest featured chipset to complement the upcoming Bulldozer high-end processors. Here's Gigabyte's edition with the GA-990FXA-UD7. Highlights include six PEG slots with 4-way CrossFire/SLI support, quad USB 3.0 ports and up to 10 SATA 6Gbps ports.
For the less demanding, the AMD 970 chipset board with a single PEG slot support could be more than adequate. This is the GA-970-UD3 motherboard sporting dual PEG slots - the second one just has an x4 bandwidth that draws upon the PCIe lanes on the Southbridge SB950 chipset. Hence, it's not ideal to use a second graphics card on the AMD 970 chipset.
New Intel Z68 & H67 Class Motherboards
Having seen what an Intel Z68 based motherboard can do, Gigabyte went one step ahead to integrate the Intel mSATA 20GB SLC SSD 311 module on the motherboard. This mean Intel Smart Response Technology works out of the box, but that also means this is going to be an expensive board. Other features are pretty much the standard Gigabyte fare on this GA-Z68-UD3-iSSD mobo.
Finally, the G1-Killer design ID makes it on to a motherboard worth investing - meet the GA-Z68-Gaming. As you can decipher, it's based on the Intel Z68 chipset, features an 8-phase power VRM design with Dual Power switching technology, Touch BIOS for Windows based BIOS tweaking, Bigfoot Networks Killer E2100 LAN onboard for superior network speeds when gaming, Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi audio processor and Quick Boost for instant overclocking. Now this is one promising board for those who can afford to splurge.
And for those who need a more mainstream variant, meet the GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3. We figure that the Z68 boards with the "X" nomenclature feature onboard video output courtesy of the Sandy Bridge processors. Apart from the video output ports, this micro-ATX board also supports Lucid's Virtu technology to take advantage of onboard and discrete graphics, Touch BIOS for Windows based BIOS manipulation, and all the other standard expectations like USB 3.0, SATA 6Gbps and many other Gigabyte-centric features.
Last but not least, here's a Mini-ITX based Intel H67 motherboard- GA-H67N-USB3-B3.. Interestingly it has dual HDMI outputs, amongst dual USB 3.0, dual SATA 6Gbps, dual SATA 3Gbps, and DualBIOS amongst others.
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