ALTHOUGH NOT NEARLY as commonplace as P67 motherboards at Computex, we did spot some H67 boards as well. The peculiar thing is, at least as far as we are aware, Intel isn’t planning on doing any LGA-1155 processors without integrated graphics, so having two different chipsets doesn’t make that much sense, but then again, Intel doesn’t always make sense when it comes to product SKUs.
The first board is from Biostar and is known as the TH67XE and it’s a mATX board. It has a full set of display connectivity options around the back including D-sub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. The board also has two USB 3.0 ports, a pair of x16 PCI Express slots, five SATA ports and one eSATA port.
Next we have Gigabyte’s H67 board which doesn’t appear to have a final name as yet, as the board only says GA-SB. Again, this board has a full set of display interfaces including D-sub, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. USB 3.0 is of course part of the package and Gigabyte has also included a x4 PCI Express slot, although as it’s located just below the x16 slot, it wouldn’t be very useful if a dual-slot graphics card were installed. The little black connectors next to the SATA ports and the CPU socket are for testing purposes and won’t be on the final board.
The third and final board is from Jetway and is for whatever reason called the IH65, suggesting it should be using the H65 chipset, but to our knowledge there is no such chipset on Intel’s roadmap. This is a full ATX board, unlike the previous two. It doesn’t have a DisplayPort connector, but it does have the other three display interfaces. This is also the only board we saw at Computex with an ONFI slot, but we doubt this is a standard that will ever take off as far as adding an SSD to a special connector on your motherboard is concerned.
With Intel working on adding a pair of GPU cores in some of its Sandy Bridge processors, the H67 chipset might prove to be more popular than any previous solution from Intel with integrated graphics. It’s good to see that the motherboard manufacturers are adding DisplayPort connectors on their boards as well, as this is a standard that is long overdue.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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