Also, it's good to see that the entire motherboard will be cooled passively. Gigabyte never used copper based heatpipe coolers as it seems. Well, fair enough .. it works out really well for them.

Okay last photo in this large slideshow aka photo gallery. Check it out, three x1 PCIe slots, two x16 PCIe graphics slots (rev 2.0). If you use two graphics cards the chipset will however split two time x8 PCIe lanes towards each slot. And to top it off, two PCI slots.

Judging from a spec sheet I received from Gigabyte, the P55 series (at least this board) will become SLI compatible just like X58. Crossfire obviously will work as well, no questions asked there.

Wrapping it up

Okay you guys and girls, that's it for this little preview of a P55 motherboard. This really as as much info as we are allowed to share. The P55 chipset itself falls under NDA, and of course Lynnfield processors (Core i5) are still pending a release and as such fall under embargo as well. Once that embargo will be lifted later this year, rest assured that we'll do our best to bring you fascinating coverage of all this new hardware, including a lot of tests and benchmarks.,

We certainly hope you enjoyed this little sneak preview.