LGA 1155
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HotHardware surveys the Cougar Point motherboard horizon, spots a winner
There's an ocean of possibilities when it comes to choosing the right Socket LGA 1155 board to mother your Sandy Bridge processor. But a roundup review at HotHardware funnels it down to just five rivals within a $179-$267 price bracket and based on Intel's P67 chipset: two offerings from Asus, plus one each from ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI. The reviewers found clear favorites depending on what you're looking for: The ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Professional and MSI P67A-GD80 can both bring serious aesthetics to your super rig, and the former has a particularly good bang-for-buck ratio. The Asus P8P67 WS Revolution stands out with four full-length PCI Express lanes for crazy graphics, while the more conservative Asus P8P67 Professional has the lowest idle power consumption of the lot. Click the source link now if you'd prefer to discover the overall winner for yourself. Otherwise, all we can say is, viva la Revolution.
ASUS' Sandy Bridge motherboards are pretty, come with Bluetooth and USB 3.0 as standard
We already got an early glimpse at what ASUS is bringing to Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge party, now how about some glamor shots of the actual hardware? The Taiwanese company has taken the shroud of mystery away from its latest range of motherboards and the first thing that stood out to us was the TUF-looking Sabertooth P67 above. It comes with an extended five-year warranty, "military-grade" electrical components, a litany of thermal sensors, and of course that Tactical Jacket up top. Beyond its obvious visual appeal, the Jacket serves to channel airflow throughout the board, aiding the cooling of more peripheral components. On the more diminutive front, ASUS is showing off a Mini-ITX board, the P8P67-I, that fits everything but full-sized RAM slots within a minuscule footprint. Check it out after the break. Oh, and ASUS is sticking USB 3.0 and Bluetooth connectivity on almost all its future boards. Yay!
Intel's 2011 CPUs require new motherboards, start saving those pennies now?
Hoping Intel's 32nm Sandy Bridge CPUs will unify your computing world next year? Bit-tech reports they may also drain your pocketbook. Anonymous sources told the site that Intel's spiffy new CPU / GPU / memory controller integrations will use two new sockets, LGA-1155 and LGA-2011; if true, you'll need to buy a new motherboard to match. Aside from packaging the aforementioned GPU and memory controller on the same die, LGA-1155 rumors don't hold any surprises thus far, but the enthusiast-grade LGA-2011 chips will supposedly sport a quad-channel DDR3 memory controller (like Nehalem EX) and the long-awaited PCI Express 3.0 for 32 lanes of graphics-gobbling bandwidth. We also hear new southbridges will have native SATA 6G. Honestly, these rumors are so tame as to be entirely credible. Let's dream up something ridiculous, like Intel actually supporting USB 3.0.
