GIGABYTE Outs New Sandy Bridge Motherboards For Real

Earlier in the year, Futurelooks had a sneak peak and an interview with the company behind one of the first ready to show Sandy Bridge boards. Today that company is ready to leak some more goodness to the masses. GIGABYTE has outed their complete trio of P67 motherboards ahead of schedule. The accompanying INTEL LGA1155 processors aren’t even due to launch till January 2011. This is somewhat similar to what happened in Taiwan the year that boards with the LGA1156 socketed P55 chipsets leaked all over the country. Only this time, it’s more paper than PCB. Here’s what we know so far…

GIGABYTE P67A-UD3R

Features:

1. Onboard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps to deliver impeccable data transfer speeds.
2. New Matte Black color PCB offering a stylish new outlook that lends itself to decoration and case mods.
3. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ 3 design with 2x Copper PCB to provide the stability, reliability and longevity essential to meet the power needs of high-end processors and other components running today’s most demanding applications and games.
4. Unique GIGABYTE 3x USB Power design with On/Off Charge USB ports to offer faster battery charging for iPhone, iPad and iPod devices.
5. CrossFireX™ support for ultimate graphics performance.
6. GIGABYTE patented DualBIOS™ technology delivering the highest level of failure protection.

Brief Specifications:

GIGABYTE P67A-UD3

Features:

1. Onboard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps to deliver impeccable data transfer speeds.
2. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ 3 design with 2x Copper PCB to provide the stability, reliability and longevity essential to meet the power needs of high-end processors and other components running today’s most demanding applications and games.
3. Unique GIGABYTE 3x USB Power design with On/Off Charge USB ports to offer faster battery charging for iPhone, iPad and iPod devices.
4. CrossFireX™ support for ultimate graphics performance
5. GIGABYTE patented DualBIOS™ technology delivering the highest level of failure protection.

Brief Specifications:

GIGABYTE H67MA-UD2H

Features:

1. Onboard SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps to deliver impeccable data transfer speeds.
2. GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ 3 design with 2x Copper PCB to provide the stability, reliability and longevity essential to meet the power needs of high-end processors and other components running today’s most demanding applications and games.
3. Unique GIGABYTE 3x USB Power design with On/Off Charge USB ports to offer faster battery charging for iPhone, iPad and iPod devices.
4. Intel® HD Graphics enabling incredible desktop media and immersive 3D experience.
5. HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort digital graphics interface to deliver smoother HD video playback.
6. CrossFireX™ support for ultimate graphics performance.
7. GIGABYTE patented DualBIOS™ technology delivering the highest level of failure protection.

Brief Specifications:

All in all, it looks like P67 and Sandy Bridge will be a fairly feature rich platform from GIGABYTE and dovetails off nicely from their very successful P55 series. The only downside is that we’ve got a new socket all over again and there is no backwards compatibility from LGA1155 processors to LGA1156.

Early reports are also saying that the chips may not be as easily overclockable as the LGA1156 without buying specific unlocked processors as was introduced with the 875K for the LGA1155. This is somewhat similar to what AMD has been doing with their differentiation of unlocked Black Edition chips to their regular locked multiplier chips. This allows INTEL to cash in on the overclockers that used to get away with a free meal. There was no pricing information available at this time.