Intel has dual PCIe 16X slot boards

INTEL HAS two new chipsets but it seems that vendors are not picking up on them that well. We could barely find any 955X based boards listed at all and most of them actually had only one PCIe slot. Only tier one and some strong tier two manufacturers are offering those boards at all, such as Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Foxconn and Abit.

Intel's new chipset will bring support for DDR2-667 and dual core Pentium D CPUs and that's about it. The rest if up to motherboard manufacturers but won't feature anything much than the cheaper 945 chipset brother.

We were not surprised to see Intel with a lot of its own boards but only Intel's board had two PCIe 16X slots, capable of accommodating two graphic cards. We expect that such a twin PCIe 16X slot board will gain support for marchitectures such as Crossfire or SLI.

We learned that this is possible, but it will be up to ATI or Nvidia to enable it. We know that the new Nvidia drivers can work even without the bridge between the cards and I guess that it was part of the Nvidia-Intel deal that Chipzilla would be able to use Nvidia SLI marchitecture in its boards. At least one of Intel's boards should be available in four days for Austrian market at least and it will cost just something less than €240. The board is equipped with i955X/iCH7R chipset, USB 2.0, Firewire 800, Gb LAN,S-ATA 300 RAID, two times PCIe x16, one PCIe 1X, 3x PCI. Looks like a decent board but knowing Intel you won't find any overclocking options on this board at least that was the case before. You can find the list of the boards here and you can find some details about this Intel board here. µ