First details on Intel X79 Express chipset

Chinese media source has published several slides from Intel’s presentation, revealing first impression of X79 Express logic.

This chipset is dedicated for motherboards with High-end Socket LGA 2011. This Socket will support Sandy Bridge–E processors, that should arrived in Q4 2011. The will have integrated quad-channel DDR3 memory controller and x32 PCI Express lines.

The chipset works like a “hub”. Includes eight PCI Express lie, 14 SATA and 14 USB 2.0 ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port. Besides that, ten SATA ports are of 6 GB/s speed rate, while eight of them can have SATA or SAS deceives connected. Thanks to Intel Rapid Storage technology the chipset supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.

Unlike P67 which is connected to central processor via DMI interfaces (essentially — PCI-Express 2.0 x4), in X79 this can be additional linked using four more PCI-Express 2.0 lines by selecting appropriate EFI settings. Considering chipset’s application field, the important thing is CPU and memory overclocking capabilities.

Unfortunately, USB 3.0 ports are not mentioned, same as Intel Thunderbolt technology.

Source: it.com.cn