14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago, Intel has announced the versions of the Cougar Point chipsets which are affected by the now infamous 6-series SATA bug and among the usual names that everybody expected to see, the Santa Clara company has also listed the Z68, confirming that the chipset is indeed in production and that it should be launched soon.
All the chipsets listed will enter mass production on February 14, and the first motherboards to features the B3 stepping of the Cougar Point PCH are expected to start shipping in early April.
Together with these new motherboards, there is a strong chance that Intel will also release the Z68 as the company has previously stated the new PCH is scheduled for a Q2 2011 launch.
Although nothing is certain at this time, Intel would have enough time at its disposal to mass produce enough Z68 chips for an early April launch.
The Z68 was designed in order to fill the gap left by the Santa Clara company in its Sandy Bridge motherboard lineup.
As a result, the chipset packs the flexible display interface needed in order to use the on-die GPU and also allows for CPU overclocking, something that wasn't possible using the existing H67 chipset.
Furthermore, the Z68 will also add an SSD caching function that allows consumers to use the installed solid state disk as a high-speed cache for the HDD greatly improving the speed of the system.
Although most enthusiasts won't be interested in running on the Sandy Bridge integrated GPU, opting for the Z68 could allow them to use the Quick Sync media accelerators packed inside Intel's second generation Core architecture.
As we previously reported, Quick Sync is able to considerably speed up the transcoding process without affecting the image quality of the resulting video (unlike Nvidia's CUDA codepath).
