I have to say, I really don't like Gigabyte's new colour scheme.

Wow, even now, still with the PS/2 and IDE...

What process is the chipset being made with? My Google skills are weak and lazy. ;)

stupid question:

What's the slot between the IDE port & RAM slots?

Question:

On the Gigabyte GA-EP55-UDF all singing and dancing 24 power phase board, what are the 4 chips to the left of the 6 DDR3 slots? They look like memory, probably Flash as all the other Gigabyte boards have the "Flash card socket" next to the DDR3 memory slots.

Cyril how much Adderall are you eating to keep these articles flowing? Good work...all other sites suck compared to this.

Agreed.

Intel told us its own P55 boards won't be forward-compatible, but third-party manufacturers' boards probably will be.

Hmmm. Gigabyte has a good point about motheboards without video out paired with Clarkdale. Once the GPU is in the CPU socket a bunch of things change, with some new implications.

It would be possible to offer a very cheap "riser" board that drops in a PCIe slot and offers the outputs -- it'd use a bunch of PCIe bandwidth but on a low-end integrated platform that isn't doing much else with PCIe, that shouldn't matter. But how do you market that? You don't sell it with the P55 mobos on sale today, so people buying the Clarkdale for their P55 rig would also have to know to buy the dongle.

But, really, who's going to "upgrade" from Lynnfield (quad) to Clarkdale (dual+IGP) anyway? You must already be on the discrete GPU upgrade train, so the IGP doesn't matter; you'd much rather just get the 32nm successor to Lynnfield. (Though Intel has claimed that they're not going to introduce a 32nm quad until Sandy Bridge, I rather expect that to change).

I thought P55 had the NB/SB integrated into one chip. What is that bottom heatsink there for?

Cyril how much Adderall are you eating to keep these articles flowing? Good work...all other sites suck compared to this.