14 DAY TRIAL // Colorful is not one of the brand names that one would associate with motherboard manufacturing, but this hasn't stopped the company from developing their own enthusiast Sandy Bridge board, dubbed the C.P67 X5.
Just as all other high-performance Sandy Bridge motherboards, this too is built using Intel's P67 chipset that supports all desktop LGA 1155 processors.
Taking a loot at the board, one can certainly see that Colorful really wanted to cater to the gaming crowd when it designed the C.P67 X5, the three PCI Express x16 slots being a dead giveaway.
Unfortunately, this is overkill for a P67 platform as the Sandy Bridge CPU only features 16 PCI Express lanes, that can only be divided in two PCIe x8 slots, the middle one running at x4 ellectricly.
In addition to these three slots, the motherboard also packs a PCIe x1 slot, dual regular PCI slots as well as a mini-PCIe slot.
This isn't something that we usually get to see installed on a full-fledged ATX motherboard, but it could prove to be useful for adding wireless connectivity to the board without occupying a full size PCIe slot.
Power is delivered to the CPU thanks to a 14 phase PWM that is cooled with two individual heatsinks connected via a heatpipe.
In the opposite corner of the motherboard, we find six SATA ports (unfortunately none are angled to improve cable management) as well as on-board power and reset buttons and a BIOS debug LCD.
Moving to the back panel, Colorful has added to the C.P67 X5 as standard stack of ports and connectors, including two USB 3.0 ports, eight regular USB 2.0 ports and optical audio out.
Sadly, the manufacturer decided not to provide users with dual Gigabit Ethernet, eSATA or FireWire ports.
The motherboard is available right now for purchase in China, its price being set at 799 yuan (about $121 US). (via Expreview)
