X79 boards to ship next month

According to Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers Intel is planning to start shipping its high performance X79 Chipset motherboards from August. The X79 chipset motherboards will support the upcoming LGA 2011 processors which will be due for release in Q1/Q2 of 2012.

The X79 Chipset has an integrated Platform Controller Hub (PCH) which controls many tasks such as SATA ports and PCI-E lanes and this Chipset is linked to the CPU's via a PCI-E 4X lane and a DMI 2.0 lane which allows simultaneous co-ordination of the functions of the computer from both the CPU and Chipset at the same time. Interestingly, X79 also provides native SATA 6GB/s support for up to 10 ports.

The chipset also supports raid 0/1/5/10 natively thanks to an Intel Rapid Store Enterprise controller. There is room for up to 8 Lanes of PCI-E 2.0 although this doesn't mean 8 lanes of 16X more like 4 lanes of 8X and lots of 4X and 1X slots. Sadly there is no native USB 3.0 support or no native PCI-E 3.0 support.

The first models may be seen later this year but they will be server models if Intel releases its SandyBridge-E Xeon processors, mainstream consumer processors will come in Q1 of 2012 with the launch of SandyBridge-E desktop processors.