14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that, even though most of them won't make it to market until next year, Sandy Bridge-ready motherboards, those not already revealed by their makers at least, are the subject of reports and leaks, and one ASUS model is no exception.
As consumers may or may not know, the Sandy Bridge series of CPUs from Intel is bound to show up within a month and a half or so.
They will, like the current Core series, have both the CPU and integrated CPU within the same package.
Some motherboards designed with the P67 chipset, which Sandy Bridge needs, have already been introduced.
Now, it seems that one of ASUS mainboards has also been detailed, though not officially and well ahead of its intended launch, whenever that is.
It is dubbed P8P67 WS Revolution and, as already said, uses the P67 chipset which includes the LGA 1155 socket.
One of the first things some may notice about it is the availability of four PCI Express x16 slots.
Apparently, ASUS implemented an NVIDIA NF200 bridge chip, which makes it possible to set up 3-way SLI multi-GPU configurations.
There are also four DDR3 memory slots with support for dual-channel DDR3, as well as the same number of SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors, for high-speed storage.
It also features dual Gigabit Ethernet, a pair of USB 3.0 connectors, 7.1 channel audio, four SATA 3.0 ports and a 16+2 digital power phase design.
Not only that, but the EPU (energy processing unit) can actually give the board an efficiency of up to 92% in terms of energy use, while power use is even further optimized by the lack of fans (passive cooling solution).
There is no way of knowing what price this newcomer will have or when it will start shipping. Still, once it does, it will be bundled with a diagnostics card.