Intel's upcoming range of Sandy Bridge Extreme processors are scheduled to make an appearance in the fourth quarter of 2011, and motherboard manufacturers are starting to rally behind the new chip by teasing an assortment of supporting X79 motherboards.
We've already seen prototype boards from ASUS and ASRock, and now EVGA is getting in on the act by providing eager enthusiasts a brief look at its yet-to-be-named X79 powerhouse.
The above picture is all we've got to go on, but it reiterates the high-end nature of Intel's next top-of-the-range socket; LGA2011.
Designed as a successor to the existing LGA1366 (X58), Intel's new-and-enlarged socket will support six-core, twelve-thread Sandy Bridge Extreme processors armed with up to 15MB of on-chip cache. That should be more than enough to dethrone the current king - Core i7 990X - in the overall performance stakes, but just in case, Intel's new frontrunner will be flanked by quad-channel memory, with EVGA's board positioning two DIMM slots on either side of the CPU socket.
The positioning of the memory slots might be an inconvenience to aftermarket CPU coolers, but what's likely to appease system builders is EVGA's implementation of a right-angled 24-pin power connector - a new addition that should make cable routing that little bit easier.
