Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge CPUs may still be some way off, but that doesn't mean that motherboard manufacturers aren't champing at the bit to show-off their upcoming products.
Biostar sent around a few press shots of two of its upcoming motherboards which are based on the P67 and H67 'Cougar Point' chipsets. This obviously means that they use the LGA 1155 interface, so will only be compatible with the more mainstream Core i3, i5 and i7 Sandy Bridge CPUs.
The TP67XE is an ATX motherboard and Biostar seems to have packed it full of features. As well as three internal SATA 3Gbps connections and a single eSATA port, the board will support a pair of SATA 6Gbps drives to make the most of those nice, fast SSDs. The manufacturer has also included higher-end features like a pair of USB 3.0 ports, an on-board error-code display and power and reset switches.
The remaining PCIe lanes are used up by a PCIe x16 slot, a PCIe x8 slot, two PCIe x1 slots and room for a pair PCI cards.
Interestingly, the board has two eight-pin CPU power-connections - an overclocking feature usually reserved for very high-end hardware.
Biostar also sent over snaps of its upcoming mATX board, the TH67XE. Despite the smaller size, the designers have managed to cram almost all of the same features onto the board. Being an H67-based board, you'll also get the option of using the onboard graphics-core with the choice of VGA, DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort outputs.
Of course, the ability to use the iGPU means that you can't run two PCIe x8 cards at the same time. The smaller board also sacrifices the error-code display, second CPU power-connection, a PCIe x1 slot and a PCI slot - though otherwise appears to be very similar to its big brother.
This is just a first look of the types of boards that will be available once the Sandy Bridge platform launches at the start of next year. Obviously more details will be available as we get closer to the release date.
