VR-Zone has managed to score a few new pictures of DFI's upcoming Intel P55 based Lanparty motherboard and although it doesn't hold to many surprises, it does incorporate a mini USB port at the rear I/O located all on its own which does look quite strange and we don't really know what it's for.

The board will most likely be called Lanparty UT P55 T3eH8 which puts it as an upper mid-range board in DFI's line-up of Lanparty products. The board on the pictures looks like an almost finished model, although it's still quite clear that this is an engineering sample, judging by the quick fix wires that are still visible on the board.

The chipset cooling hasn't been finalised as yet, but this gives us a chance to see some additional details. The board features an 8-phase digital PWM and there's also a digital switch for the PCI Express slots, as the Core i5 CPUs only have 16 PCI Express lanes built in for graphics which can be set to dual x8 mode with an external switch. The P55 chipset should be very easy to cool and it looks tiny, but it's worth remembering that this is pretty much just a glorified southbridge rather than a full-on chipset as with previous generations.

The slot layout of this board has changed drastically from the Lanparty P55 DK, although you get the same three x16 PCI Express slots (we're not sure about the bandwidth of the third slot), two x1 PCI Express slots and two PCI slots, just in a different configuration that seems to make a little bit more sense. DFI has also decided to upgrade the audio solution and as such there are no onboard audio connectors, as DFI will be supplying one of their Bernstein audio modules instead.

Other features include a pair of PS/2 ports, six rear USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, dual Gigabit Ethernet, that strange mini USB port and a first for DFI, an eSATA connector, something we've been waiting on from DFI. The board also has headers for an additional 10 USB 2.0 ports (where are they all going to go? Ed.), eight SATA ports, an IDE and floppy connector, a debug LED and a pair of buttons for power on/off and reset. Finally this board has a slot for Intel's upcoming second generation Turbo Memory modules, although we'll see how popular these will be, as we have a feeling that unless they offer a huge performance boost, most people will opt for some more RAM instead.

You can find more details and pictures here

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