Nehalem Motherboards Appear

Want to see what the future of Intel motherboards looks like? We have gathered some pictures of the first set of Nehalem platform system boards for your perusal. See bow three-channel memory and quad PCIe slots will look in your box next year.
At Intel’s own booth, hidden in a wall FULL of motherboards, we found some mystery products being shown with the name “X58” attached to them.  These are in fact the first motherboards being built for Intel’s upcoming Nehalem architecture processors; a technology we have been discussing quite a bit.  Below are examples from abit, ASUS, Foxconn and Gigabyte.

Computex 2008: Intel Nehalem Motherboards on Display - Motherboards 7

Computex 2008: Intel Nehalem Motherboards on Display - Motherboards 8


Computex 2008: Intel Nehalem Motherboards on Display - Motherboards 9

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On their own, these motherboards don’t appear to be much different than current generation motherboards be it for AMD or Intel platforms.  You will notice that the abit and ASUS motherboards only have three memory slots – a result of the three channel memory controller on the Nehalem processor.  The other motherboards however have four slots – a mystery that I haven’t quite unraveled. 

The processor socket is similar to that of the LGA775 in its design – the CPUs will remain pin-less with a ZIF-style retention configuration.  Almost all of the motherboards have four PCIe slots on it, theoretically for some serious multi-GPU action. 

Computex 2008: Intel Nehalem Motherboards on Display - Motherboards 11

Computex 2008: Intel Nehalem Motherboards on Display - Motherboards 12

Intel did have a Nehalem system on hand to prove it was working – they were demoing Assassin’s Creed on it.  There were no details on the CPU frequency or anything like that, but there WAS an NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 in the box…

More from Computex coming soon!