MSI LGA 1155 Motherboards for Sandy Bridge Pictured

Since the new line of processors from Intel is nearing launch, it is unsurprising to hear of upcoming motherboards as well, and it seems that some pictures of MSI's line have made their way to the web already.

So far, three motherboards with support for the LGA 1155 socket have been revealed, their names being P67A-GD65 and P67A-GD55 and H67MA-ED55.

The first two feature the ATX form factor, whereas the third one is smaller, being designed with the micro ATX form factor.

All of them lack actual Northbridge parts, since those will be integrated into the Intel Sandy Bridge central processing unit itself.

They also have many things in common, such as the number of memory and PCI Express slots, as well as support for some of the newest technologies.

To be more specific, they each come with four DDR3 slots, a pair of SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, four SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors and a single pair of PCI Express x16 slots.

Said slots have full support for SLI or CrossFireX multi-GPU configurations and are conveniently placed quite far from each other, to accommodate dual-slot or even triple-slot cards.

There are, of course, certain differences between the upcoming platforms as well.

While they all have Gigabit Ethernet, Power and Reset buttons and 7.1 channel audio, the P67A-GD65 has three USB 3.0 ports, while the other two have a pair each.

The P67A-GD65 also has two extra SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors and, like the H67MA-ED55, features voltage read points.

Finally, all three of them boast the OC Genie technology, which overclocks the whole system at the press of a button, plus DrMOS.

The first batch of Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs should become available in January, probably around 2011 CES, which means that Micro-Star International should deliver these and/or other boards around the same time.