Intel’s Flagship Sails in Time for Santa’s Sleigh.

On November 14th we witnessed the release of Intel’s fervently anticipated x79 platform, which finally succeeds the long reigning  x58 as the company’s flagship chipset.

Despite the enormous popularity of the initial generation of Sandy Bridge based technology and the readiness of most enthusiasts to adopt it over the older, more expensive Nehalem platform, neither the P67, H67 or Z68 was intended to supplant the x58, which has occupied its spot at the top of the tree for almost three years.  Now, with yet another a brand new socket design, Intel has set the seal on its “Sandybridge” family.  Prepare for Daddy Bear!

The revised socket will play host to what quite possibly are physically the largest socket based CPUs yet seen in standard desktop configurations.

The Sandy Bridge “E” chip incorporates the same 434 square millimeter and 32 nanometer die as the regular Sandy Bridge though the two models available at launch (the i7-3960X and i7-3930K) both feature an additional two cores bringing the total number to a Gulftown equalling six.

A second extreme edition CPU (the i7-3980x) and a quad core revision of the standard edition (the i7-3820), are scheduled for release in early-mid 2012.

The chip’s internal cache has been raised from its previous maximum of 8mb to 10mb for the 3820, 12mb for the 3930k and 15mb for the 3960x.  The Thermal Design Power (TDP) now tops out at 130W (up from 95W) while the transistor count comfortably exceeds a total of 2 billion.

With the exception of the Z68’s Smart Response Technology, the x79 enjoys all the benefits offered by the three existing mainstream chipsets along with some key introductions.  One feature making its debut on a consumer grade chipsets that of quad channel memory with up to 8 physical DIMM slots, affording the option of installing a colossal 64GB of memory (when using 8x8GB modules).  Unlike the x58, the number of DIMM slots can be reduced and allow the memory to operate in tri or dual channel modes, this will allow the chipset to be more easilty accomodated in micro-ATX or even mini-itx forms.

Also introduced is the third generation of PCI express architecture (PCI-E 3.0), which effectively doubles the bandwidth of each PCI-e slot and enables true 16X16 compatibility without the need for Nvidia’s Nf200 bridge chip.  It remains to be seen if the latter development will set a trend for all future x79 based boards since with so much bandwidth natively available, even 3 and 4 WAY GPU configurations could happily operate at 16x16x8 or 8x8x8x8 without any sacrifice in performance.  However, we have yet to glimpse any 3rd gen PCI-E video cards and when these do emerge, it might well be that they rapidly exploit the extra headroom and thus cause bridge chips to be re-introduced on certain top of the range x79 boards from the likes of Evga, Asus and Gigabyte.

We have already seen snaps of Evga’s SR-3 dual socket 2011 prototype board which is set to succeed last year’s 1366 equivalent, the SR-2.

This appears to show the same dual NF200 chip setup as its predecessor though at the time of writing, EVGA has not disclosed any official details on the matter.

On the negative side, native SAS (serial attached scuzzy) support was on the cards but subsequently aborted.  We continue to be deprived of native USB 3.0, once again forcing motherboard makers to rely on third party solutions and the provision of just two SATA 3.0/6gbps connectors by default – the same as on the three exsisting chipsets – has to be considered somewhat mean spirited, especially so close to Christmas and hence it is with some hope that we look to our friends at Asus, EVGA and Gigabyte et al to work their magic and make amends for at least some of Intel’s shortcomings.

At the time of writing, around six high-end boards t are readily available from  good e-tailers with prices ranging from about £180 to £280 while several further and ultra feature rich variants can be expected to make their appearance just in time to burst your festive stockings!  Until then, you’ll have to be content with these photos…