Our friends from bit-tech recently published
a
story from Computex 2010 indicating that at least one motherboard hardware
manufacturer has produced a design based on Intel’s upcoming P67 mainstream
chipset.
According to the report, that manufacturer is ASRock, and
the name of the board is P67 Extreme 3. Intel’s P67 chipset will pair with the
upcoming LGA 1155 desktop platform based on first-generation Sandy Bridge 32nm
architecture. The company has been able to confirm that there is no USB 3.0
integration with this second-generation
PCH chipset,
however, but it did mention that two of the six native SATA II ports have been
upgraded to SATA III 6Gbps.
The ASRock P67 Extreme 3 features three
PCI-E 2.0 slots, with the top slot providing x16 bandwidth, the middle slot providing x8 bandwidth, and the bottom slot providing x4 bandwidth. By utilizing
all three available slots, the board will be able to support Nvidia Tri-SLI and
ATI Tri-CrossFireX (as well as Quad-SLI and Quad-CrossFireX with two dual-GPU
solutions), although bandwidth may be severely limited for more
high-performance enthusiast GPUs on the market.
As far as memory is concerned, the board features four slots
with support for DDR3 2600MHz+ speeds in dual-channel mode. In other words,
Sandy Bridge motherboard designs like the P67 Extreme 3 should significantly
raise the bar for achievable overclocking limits of what is capable on a
mainstream platform.
The board also features a 12 + 2 “advanced” power phase
design, sporting ASRock DuraCap high-quality conductive polymer capacitors that
offer 2.5x longer lifetime than conventional capacitors. It has also been noted
that the upcoming P67 second-generation PCH requires no more cooling than the
current P55 chipset, and bit-tech believes the “7” in P67 denotes support for
native SATA 6Gbps and RAID.
While the successor to the P55 platform isn’t due to release
until
Q1 2011, we
are appreciative of ASRock’s unveiling of an early prototype design based on
Sandy Bridge and hope to uncover more details as Computex 2010 progresses over
the next few days.