Tiny Tom Logan (OC3D.net) was able to release a couple videos showing Asus's new 1155 (sandybridge) mobo's. I thought they were quite informative and I am loving Asus's initiative with these. Keep in mind Intel's NDA runs until Jan 9th so there is a lot that can't be spoken of yet, but I for one am very excited. FYI for those of you that do the new pc twice a decade, the Sabretooth has a 5yr warranty attached to it.
From what he said, you're supposed to use a downforce CPU fan to push the air over it. I'm assuming it'll then exhaust out of the top. Even so, I am worried that it'll be a hotbox just like the 800d is, as it tried a similar approach. If you watched the 2nd video, he hinted about the colors of the PCI-E meaning something. Do you know what he's referring to?
Its not just the Sabertooth board I just got one on my new system. I looked thru a good bit of the EVGA, MSI, and other versions of the Asus boards and most companies have versions of there boards. With these crazy over sized heat syncs. Even some of the new fans like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103056 have shrouds designed to help get heat out, but goodluck changing out your ram. Maybe if they gave it a fold away design and it didn't weigh 2.6lbs. Always the suck part about building a new system though. Everytime you think youve waited long enough the next thing comes out.
Well he mentioned the PLX chip, so there are added PCI-E lanes on that motherboard. How it is configured I cant imagine. I would have said two full 16x and an 8x slot maybe, however I forgot Intel chipsets are way behind the times and dont have nearly enough lanes to do even that with only a single PLX chip. Although this info is under NDA, I am almost positive the chipset will have 28 PCI-E lanes on it. The southbridge will definitely be connected using 4 lanes, lowering the total to 24 usable. The official spec only gives 16 lanes to graphics. leaving 8 lanes for additional connections. Most likely split between various PCI-E 1x slots and possibly another controller chip of some kind. Oh and dont forget a 1x link going to the audio chip. One good thing though is that the PCI-E lanes have better bandwidth. You probably didnt hear, but Intel boards have had bottlenecked graphics when using big powerful cards because even though they were "PCI-E 2.0", the chipsets only supported 2.5GT/s per lane. This is being fixed with the 6-series chipsets and going to the full spec 5GT/s lanes. So although we still dont have enough lanes to run full speed multi-gpu across multiple slots, it is good to know that you can run the big dual-gpu single cards to their full potential. Intel currently has a few boards that have SEVEN 8x PCI-E slots on a single board with the use of PLX chips. You could change the configuration of those and get three full 16x's, a PCI-E 1x, a PCI-E 4x, and two old PCI's. So anything is possible, but with only a single PLX chip I cant see there being three full 16x lanes. At best you are looking at two full 16x and a single 8x slot. At best. As for the 3 different color SATA ports I can provide the answer to that as well. Not 100% official as Intel refuses to comment, but leaked info says the new 6-series chipset from Intel WILL NOT have a full set of SATA 6gbps ports! It will ONLY HAVE 2. Thus on the board with three different colors you have four SATA3 and two SATA6 from the southbridge chip, and an addition two SATA6 ports from a separate chip. Most likely you have a PCI-E 4x link going to this separate SATA chip as well. I really dont know why Intel does not produce better chipsets, AMD's 8-series chipsets have 44 PCI-E lanes and six SATA6 ports. The new SandyBridge chipsets WILL NOT have USB3 either, just like AMD's latest does not. All USB3 support will be through a separate chip. Another thing to mention is that only the P67 boards are supposed to allow for dual 8x graphics links for multi-gpu. The H67 is only supposed to allow for a single 16x slot. Additionally, H67 will have locked memory dividers and only support official spec speeds. So if you are into overclocked everything on the computer you will need to get a P67 chipset to be able to change overclocking options with the RAM.
ok, SHHH on this picture I am about to post. Looks like the board is capable of two full 16x and a single 8x. Dont ask me about if ATI and Nvidia GPUs actually work in Windows properly though, most likely not as I didnt see a Hydra chip there: I guess that is capable because it uses the PEX860B-BA50BC PLX chip. Ill attempt to find out how many PCI-E lanes that chip provides.
The "Hydra tech" is from a company called Lucid Logic actually. I dont think it is owned by MSI, MSI is just the only manufacturer who has implemented the Hydra chip on some of their motherboards. Maybe I didnt type what I meant to say properly before. What I meant was that although the EFI screen shows both Nvidia GPUs and an ATI GPU connected to the motherboard, I think they just did that to show the board can run a GPU from either company. It wouldn't necessarily work together in Windows unless it had a Hydra chip on the motherboard, which I did not see anywhere. That picture is an actual pic of the EFI bios, which I think is still under NDA which is why you dont see much info on it yet. I simply posted it to show that the board that has 3 different colored PCI-E 16x slots is capable of running two at full 16x and one at 8x.
Yea that makes sense as it was just an event to show off the board and bios. TBQH I'm happy that AMD isn't trying to make it so their cards only run on their boards.
AMD never did try and do that, Crossfire has always worked on Intel boards as long as the Intel chipset was capable of multi-gpu. The only thing AMD does is not allow Nvidia to run SLI on AMD chipsets. And that is because Nvidia refused to allow AMD to run Crossfire on the Nvidia chipsets first. Nvidia and Intel had some disagreements too and SLI did not work on Intel boards for a while. Actually Nvidia had some disagreements with everyone. They just dont get along with people Management at Nvidia is just a bunch of douche bags. Nvidia and Intel still dont get along very well, but it has settled down quite a bit from a couple years ago.