14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that unusual things never cease to occur on the hardware market, especially when it comes to next-generation devices, as ASRock has made it more than clear now with its upcoming P67-based motherboard.
Hard disk drives with capacities of up to 24 TB have just been revealed to be closer to reality than one may expect, but this is hardly the only 'unique' event on the IT market.
As end-users may or may not know, the Sandy Bridge processors that Intel will soon officially introduce are designed for a special socket.
Said socket is known as LGA 1155 and is part of the P67 chipset, on which motherboards have already been based.
ASRock itself not too long ago detailed its entire collection of such motherboards, which is composed of eight platforms in total.
Now, it seems that that very same P67 chipset has been modified by ASRock to work with current-generation Intel central processing units.
Basically, ASRock built a P67-based mainboard with support for LGA 1156 CPUs, one named P67 Transformer, or so it is said.
The main asset is the availability of a PCI Express 2.0 connection, as opposed to how the P55 only has PCI Express 1.1.
This should allow the SATA 6.0 Gbps and USB 3.0 ports to work at very high speeds even when more than one device is connected, since PCI Express 2.0 has a larger bandwidth.
On that note, the Transformer boasts one PCI Express x16 slot, a pair of SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors, four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports and two USB 3.0 ports.
Finally, there are four DDR3 memory slots and a debug LED and Gigabit Ethernet, plus 7.1 channel audio.
TweakTown managed to post a video of the board. As for when it will become available, the report says next month, meaning that it may arrive in time for Christmas.