14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire has been quite busy lately as it has announced an impressive number of Intel motherboards, and their LGA 1155 lineup is bound to get a new addition quite soon, since, during CeBIT 2011, the company has showcased an upcoming mini-ITX board based on the H67 chipset.
Although Sapphire hasn't decided how to name this board yet, judging by the pictures provided it seems like its design is quite in an advanced stage, suggesting that the company is probably getting ready to release it to market.
Compared to most other H67 motherboards that are available out there, Sapphire's creation features a redesigned printed circuit board layout that switches the position of the chipset with that of the CPU socket, resulting in a unique design.
How that will work out still remains to be seen, but pulling out the two memory modules without first removing the PCI Express graphics card from the system is clearly out of the question.
Using non-boxed coolers could also prove to be a challenge as spacing around the CPU socket is limited at best, but I doubt that too many users actually expect to pair mini-ITX boards with high-performance coolers.
The rest of the design is pretty standard as the CPU is powered by a four-phase VRM, and the board comes equipped with four SATA ports, two of them of the 6Gbps variety.
Going to the back of the motherboard we find the usual assortment of ports and connectors, including dual SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet and Bluetooth connectivity, 7.1 channel audio out, an optical S/PDIF connector as well as D-Sub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs.
No details regarding pricing and availability were made public at this point, but, as I mentioned earlier, the motherboard is expected to come to market pretty soon. (via ComputerBase)
