Intel's chipset behind the most powerful six-core CPU is officially branded X79. It is the only chipset of choice for Sandy Bridge E CPUs hat are scheduled for appearance in Q4 2011 and fit in new socket LGA2011.
The chipset is all about overclocking and it brings a good overclocking support for both CPU and memory settings. It comes in a choice of two 16X PCIe or four 8X so some crazy boards will come with support for four graphics slots. The chipset does not support USB 3.0 and it copes with this lack of support with 14 USB 2.0 ports. We are sure that motherboard manufacturers can add an external USB 3.0 support via some chips like Marvell.
The chipset also supports Intel Rapid storage technology enterprise edition including (Raid 0/1/5/10) and a total number of SATA ports stops at 14 while ten of them can reach 6Gb/s, as well as SAS storage. This is hardly a surprise as this chipset was originally meant for server market.
The board has a PCI slot which is kind of surprising and it also comes with native Gigabit Ethernet.
