14 DAY TRIAL // With more than three months to go until Intel makes official its high-performance Sandy Bridge-E processors and X79 chipset, ECS has showcased an LGA-2011 motherboard, based on the upcoming PCH, which is known as the X79R-A.
The motherboard features the characteristic ECS look and it sport four DIMM slots that are placed around the LGA 2011 socket.
These work in a quad-channel mode and support DDR3 speeds of up to 2600MHz, depending on the number of DIMM sockets populated (2600MHz only supported in dual-channel mode).
To the left of the memory sockets, ECS has placed four PCI Express x16 slots, which are driven by the 40 lane PCI-E Gen 3 controller integrated inside Sandy Bridge-E processors.
Judging from the color coding of the PCI Express x16 slots, only two of these appear to work in x16 mode, while the other two are most probably x4. The motherboard is however compatible with both SLI and CrossFireX multi-GPU setups.
Other expansion options include a pair of PCI-E x1 slots, 10 SATA 6Gbps ports and an on-board USB 3.0 pin header for routing two such ports to the chassis' front panel.
More USB 3.0 ports are available on the rear I/O panel, where ECS has also installed a Bluetooth radio transmitter, the board's 7.1 channel audio connectors and a Clear CMOS switch.
Two additional Power and reset switches are placed on the board's PCB near a BIOS debug display.
CPU power is delivered by what seems to be a 6+1 phase PWM, which should be cooled by a heatsink in the final revision of the X79R-A.
Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processors are expected to debut in the forth quarter of 2011 and the initial CPU batch will include three chips, two featuring a six-core design and a quad-core model. The ECS X79R-A is also expected to debut in Q4 2011. (via VR-Zone)
