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Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/08/p55_motherboards/

Lynnfield mobos on the march

Core i7 & i5, meet P55 & LGA 1156

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Hardware, 8th September 2009 20:54 GMT

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Now that Intel's Lynnfield chips have been officially released [1], motherboard makers are rushing their consumer and enthusiast boards into the eager hands of waiting customers.

Although sample quantities of the boards have been available for some time - along with sample Core i7 and Core i5 Lynnfield chips - today marks the beginning of what may very will be a mass migration to Intel's P55 Express chipset [2] and the LGA1156 socket.

An article [3] in Tuesday's DigiTimes points to three manufacturers that the Taiwanese market-watchers call "first-tier" motherboard makers - namely Micro-Star International (MSI [4]), Gigabyte [5], and Asustek [6].

MSI is offering four [7] P55-based mobos, each of which features the company's OC Genie [8] push-button auto-overclocking technology, which allows even non-techie newbies to break their Lynnfield processors' posted speed limits.

Gigabyte offers six [9] Lynnfield-capable mobos, each featuring the company's Smart 6 [10] system-management utilities. Among the six smart utilities in Smart 6 is the nifty DualBIOS [11] technology, which provides a backup BIOS chip should your fiddling with your primary BIOS wreak crash-worthy havoc.

Asustek ups the P55 ante to a full nine mobos: a pair in its Maximus III [12] line, six in its P7P55D [13] line, and the single Nvidia nForce 200-equipped and less-than-modestly named P7P55 WS Supercomputer [14].

P55-based motherboards have also been announced by Jetway [15], EGVA [16], DFI [17], and undoubtedly others. ®