New Intel socket X79 motherboards pictured

The LGA 2011 socket is a new Intel socket set to replace the current 1366 sockets. The processors for this socket are expected to be released and officially launched in Q4 later this year.

Some of the key expectations of this new socket from Intel are that the LGA 2011 boards will come with:

• Quad channel memory support
• Sata III controllers integrated into the X79 chipset
• USB 3.0 support
• Intel Gigabit ethernet support

Two boards have been publicly displaced so far one from ASUS as seen here:

C1X79 EVO

The other being one from Gigabyte as seen here:

GA-X79A-UD3

What is interesting to note, even from the lower end motherboards is that there is a lot of PCI-E connectivity integrated into the LGA 2011 socket itself. Out of the 5 PCI-E slots on the UD3, four are wired to the LGA 2011 and 1 to the northbridge so what this essentially means is that all boards on this socket will provide at least 2 way SLI and CFX support.

The Quad channel memory is also something new we are yet to see, currently we have triple channel memory.

For the performance enthusiasts there is also apparent support for a 10-way Sata 6GB/s RAID controller with the UD3 whilst the ASUS board was a little more quiet about the features it had to offer.