14 DAY TRIAL // Details on Intel X58-based motherboards have been popping up on the Internet for some time now, somehow despite the fact that these boards aren't expected to be released until sometime in mid-November, along with Intel's lineup of the next-generation Core i7 processors. Now, it looks like several major motherboard makers are nearly close to finishing (if they haven’t already) the design of their own Core i7-loving motherboards.
The guys over at the Chinese-language Expreview have gathered several pictures of upcoming X58 motherboards, some of which had not surfaced until now. The pictured models include designs from manufacturers such as ASUS, MSI, Foxconn, ECS and Gigabyte, which can only mean that we are entering the final stages before the release of the next generation desktop hardware platform, designed by Intel.
MSI's board has been detailed on the Internet quite extensively over the past last weeks. However, as it turns out, the Taiwanese manufacturer hasn't really finished work on its Eclipse motherboard. In the latest picture provided, the X58-enabled Eclipse comes featured with a different cooling solution than what we’ve seen so far and that has been designed to ensure the cooling factor on the mobo's MOSFETs, Northbridge and Southbridge. There's also a new D-LED2 display placed on the bottom of the board, at the back of the PCI-Express graphics slots.
This is the first time we see the Foxconn Renaissance, which appears to be featuring a rather interesting and unique cooling solution. The X58 chipset will be cooled down by a big, round-shaped heatsink that is connected, through a single heatpipe, to the heatsink placed on the mobo's MOFSETs. The Foxconn mobo uses an orange and black PCB and a small, round heatsink for the ICH10 Southbridge chipset.
Another new motherboard design featuring the X58 chipset comes from ECS, which has featured it with a full heatsink solution. This board should be part of the company's Black Series, meaning, it will be targeted at high-end performance users. Like all of the pictured boards, it sports a Triple-Channel DDR3 memory support, and comes with two full X16 PCI Express slots.
The leaked pictures also include a reference design by Intel, seemingly different from all the other X58 mobos designed by the afore-mentioned makers.