Intel X58 platforms are staying around for a while

WHEN SANDY BRIDGE Socket LGA1155 processors and mainboards hit the shops in early January, some felt that not only would the old quad core Lynnfield 45nm Nehalem P55 LGA1156 platform be replaced - which was the intent anyway - but also that the higher end X58 LGA1366 series would suffer significantly. After all, the new quad core Sandy Bridge processors were not that much slower than even the six core Westmeres in the X58, at up to half the price.

However, the much better I/O scaling of the X58, especially with over twice the I/O PCIe lanes for graphics, as well as faster performance in well-threaded applications due to more cores available, was a reason for the X58 to continue to be viable until the 8-core Socket LGA2011 appears in about six months.

Now, as I was told even by shop owners in Singapore as well as the friendly Taiwanese, X58 sales seem to have been good in February after the SATA issue with the P67 chipset in Sandy Bridge. The widely publicised glitch at least swayed some of the high end and upper mainstream users back to the older platforms.

What's really interesting is that, before CeBIT, we suddenly saw quite a few new X58 mainboard introductions. Gigabyte has continued the tradition of having the most 'comprehensive' feature set mainboard from the X58A-UD9, with its supersize and four full x16 PCIe slots, to the new G1Killer mainboards with integrated Sound Blaster X-Fi audio and KillerNIC networking. Even players like Sapphire, with its takeover of the EVGA design team, now have brand new X58 mainboards with top end features and componentry.

Finally, Asus also refreshed its ROG Rampage III line with the Black Edition version, and Foxconn continues pushing its own X58 high-end branded board as well.

In summary, due to the combination of Sandy Bridge's initial rollout birth pains combined with only incremental performance gains in real-world use over the previous mid-range Lynnfield Nehalem, and having to wait a long time for the high end refresh in the form of LGA2011 8-core Sandy Bridges, the X58 platform is enjoying its - likely last - brief rejuvenation before the last bell rings.

It is stable, runs fast with six cores, has huge memory bandwidth and capacity due to three channels, and has plenty of I/O expandability to handle far more graphics, networking, storage and interconnect loads than the P67, for example.

If you want more, wait another six months - after all, both Intel and AMD will have brand new high end stuff to offer by then. We will cover more of the new and not so new X58 motherboards here as we encounter them. µ