WE’VE ALREADY COVERED what is most of Intel’s consumer line-up of Sandy Bridge motherboards, but the company is also readying a line of business centric models alongside some more affordable consumer options. These boards fall into Intel’s Executive and Classic series of boards respectively and consist of a total of seven models so far.
Starting with the Q67 chipset models we have two micro ATX models, the DXQ67SW and the DQ67OW. The DQ67SW will replace the current DQ57TM and it’s the top model in the Executive series. The DQ67OW on the other hand seems to be replacing the much older DQ45CB which is an LGA-775 board. Finally we have the mini ITX DQ67EP which is set to replace the DQ45EK which is also an LGA-775 board. Intel appears to be keeping the DQ57TML and DB43LD boards around at least until the second quarter of next year.
In the Classic series we’re looking at a new entry with the DB65AL which is a B65 chipset micro-ATX board. The B65 chipset is meant to be Intel’s solution for less demanding business users in the SOHO business environment and as such lack some of the fancier remote management features of the Q67 chipset. It also lacks support for RAID and has only support for a single SATA 6Gbps port. Oddly enough Intel doesn’t appear to have any motherboards in its current roadmap based on the Q65 chipset which falls between the Q67 and B65.
There are also three consumer centric models there, the DH61BE and the DH61CR, both micro-ATX boards where the DH61BE will replace the DG43RK and the DH61CR will replace the DG41TX. The third and final board is the mini-ITX DH61DL which will replace the DG41AN. Presumably this means that the DH61DL will be a very basic board, as the DG41AN doesn’t have much in terms of features compared to Intel’s other mini-ITX boards. For those wanting a more feature rich option, the DH61AG in the Media series would be the model to go for, but this isn’t set to launch until Q2 next year.
All the other models in Intel’s Classic series will continue to be offered until at least Q2 next year which includes one H55 chipset board for LGA-1156 processors and a mix between G43 and G41 motherboards for LGA-775 processors. This also suggests that Intel isn’t expecting to kill off either socket until at least after the second quarter of 2011, so get prepared of a year of no less than four different consumer CPU sockets from Intel. By the end of the year we should see both LGA-775 and LGA-1156 being discontinued leaving LGA-1155 as the major CPU socket for Intel’s consumer level boards. As for LGA-1366, we don’t really know what Intel is planning at this moment in time, but it’ll be with us for most, if not all of next year judging by the most current roadmaps we’ve seen.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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