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The Motherboard

Once you peek at the block diagram for Intel's chipset, you will notice that it is offering quite a set of features. But motherboard manufacturers like to distinguish themselves, especially with performance products, you like to have something unique, or offer a better feature set opposed to the competition.

The ODM takes the chipset, and then designs a completely new infrastructure surrounding and supplementing that P67 based motherboard. But let's have a look and walk through the features.

Above the packaging, new design. Gigabyte is going for simple. Inside it, a P67 motherboard. As you guys know the launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge processors is getting closer, and with it again comes a new CPU socket (LGA 1155), and thus new motherboard chipsets. On good thing though, older socket LGA1156 CPU cooler will fit fine, so you do not need to purchase new mounting systems for the cooler or anything.

Gigabyte has an entire range of these motherboards and for the model shown today is making sure that graphics cards solutions work as there are a total of two PCI Express x16 slots, three PCI Express x1 slots, and two PCI slots on the motherboard

For those wondering if you like to go multi-GPU with two cards, this is possible at a 8:8 PCIe lane configuration, that is enough for modern high end graphics cards. A single card will kick into x16 if you do not occupy any other PCIe slot. Included in the bundle is:

• Motherboard
• Driver CD
• User manual
• Quick installation guide
• Four SATA cables
• I/O shield
• 2-way SLI connector

We'll talk about that a little more on the next pages of course. Bundling wise the motherboard comes with everything needed, lacking however is a proper SATA 6G cable.