It's little secret that Intel will be launching Sandy Bridge Extreme chips in the near future, to supplant the high-end ground held by the venerable X58/LGA1366 platform. Giving us a glimpse of what to expect, HEXUS popped along to an ASUS X79 chipset technical seminar held in London last week.
On display were three families of boards; Rampage, Sabertooth and regular Pro, matching what we have seen from the motherboard manufacturer in the past. Now while we've already reported on a number of rumours regarding the new chips and motherboards, this is the first time that we've had a sanctioned play.
Here's a mainstream P9X79 Deluxe. Notice the huge LGA2011 socket in the middle? ASUS expects the vast majority of its X79 boards to feature a centrally-located socket that's flanked by four DIMM slots per side; the design is consistent across boards, as far as we could tell.
All ASUS X79 offerings will ship with an updated UEFI BIOS, ostensibly geared towards the enthusiast, and every board will support various CrossFireX and SLI configurations. The chipset is known not to integrate new technologies, making board layout somewhat problematic when faced with housing a bunch of ASICs and working with that huge socket-and-DDR3 layout.
The LGA2011 socket is fundamentally different to LGA1366 - heck, it's larger, for starters - but high-end ASUS boards will ship with an additional, bundled motherboard backplate enabling some LGA1366 coolers to work with X79. This is good news if your cooler doesn't have a 'free' LGA2011 upgrade.
From what we saw at the event, ASUS is putting considerable stock in X79, which is perhaps not altogether surprising given the lukewarm reception for AMD's Bulldozer CPUs. Like Bulldozer boards, there are no video outputs on X79; it's designed to be used with discrete cards.
ASUS wouldn't be drawn on explicit pricing, sadly, though representatives did say X79 will arrive at the same sort of levels as when X58 was introduced: we read this as don't expect too much change, if at all, from £200.
Intel knows that it has the high-end desktop space all sewn up, and this fact alone makes Core i7 3000-series and X79 an expensive proposition. Let's hope the rumoured SNB-E i7 3820 comes in at a sensible price, for it could well be the next Core i7 920.
Anyone interested in X79, then?
