Pics of Gigabyte X79 boards seen on VR Zone
 

Since I am a borderline insomniac, I was poking around the web and stumbled across this on VR Zone Photos of Gigabyte's X79 motherboards from IDF by VR-Zone.com

Supposedly these are hitting the market in november, but the boards may change due to changing specs coming out of Intel.

edit...link to TPU about this story...doean't have as many nice pictures Gigabyte Displays its X79 High-End Motherboard Lineup at IDF | techPowerUp

edit 2-- Anandtech has some pics of boards from MSI, as well as a look at the Gigabyte X79 UEFI

TPU also has some pics of an Intel X79 board.

Nice,

Interesting way to position the memory slots on them now.

-ST

With RAM slots of both sides there might cause some interesting issues with CPU cooler clearance.

Indeed, Slightly strange that the UD3 has 4 slots for ram, the UD5 has 8 and the rest of the range back down to 4. odd

Holy sata ports batman, loving it :)

I cannot remember which site had it (over a month ago now), but there is a reason for the DIMM layout. Apperently, Intel spec's mandate this because of the 4 channels and the associated latency. To minize the latency they space all DIMMs as close to the socket as possible.

EDIT: I still shake my head at the PCI slots at some of the boards, seriously PCI?:blarg:

Big fail intel, this way to place ram is definatly gonna be a pain in the you know what I mean. Big cooler will be a real pita and smaller case wont help at all. I think they are playing with their popularity, they know we will buy anyway so they keep changing socket for nothing and now they are doing dumb thing like that. FUU you intel!

Be thankful there is no IDE or Floppy connector on there taking up unnecessary space.

Read carefully ;)

The X79 chipset ended up having features cut at the last minute. It only provides 2 SATA3 and 4 SATA2 just like the P67/Z68. So the SATA port configuration will likely change in the production models, unless Gigabyte puts a ton of extra controllers onboard (and thus eating up PCIe lanes)

Thus as much as I try, I can't seem to find any reason why to even think of buying it over a much cheaper 1155 or maybe Bulldozer (With it's never ending delays) platform... especially after seeing the benches at toms. (yes I know those are pre-production chips, but still..)