Galaxy, a renowned manufacturer of graphics cards decided to expand their range of hardware to other segments. The company demonstrated at Computex new line SSDs and power supplies, but even more interesting is their motherboard.

Today Anandtech had an announcement from Intel about a reduction to their desktop motherboard business with a ramp down planned over the next three years. This means that Intel will begin to bow out of this market slowly with an expected exit sometime around 2016. Intel will continue to work with third party manufacturers in the design and build of their boards including the development of reference boards for new form factors (like the one used for the Next Unit of Computing).  The question is; what will this mean to both Intel and the rest of the desktop market? In truth it means very little to the majority of the market, but it is significant in many ways.

Manufacturers of hardware components are not expecting a significant recovery of the PC market over the next year. Asus and Gigabyte, both leading manufacturer of motherboards, have said that in 2013 they expect an equal or slightly lower number of deliveries of motherboards than was the case this year.

On an investors conference that Asustek hosted yesterday, company president, Jerry Shen announced that company sales have been beyond planned in Q2 of 2012. They achieved a new record in operating profits and profits before tax. They plan to ship out 22 million notebooks in 2012, and believe that the release of Windows 8 in the fourth quarter will be very important for their market results. According to Asustek there is a new wave of competition arriving at the end of the year that will reshuffle the rankings of tablet and notebook PC players. They announced consolidated revenues of $3.15 billion for second quarter, which is a 4% increase.

With PCIe 3.0 just coming on to the scene the PCI special interest group (PCI-SIG) just announced that they are planning on releasing PCIe 4.0 sometime around 2014-2015. Now that is assuming we all survive the Mayan apocalypse, but if we all do then it looks like the interconnects between the devices on our systems will get quite a bit faster. According to the press release, the new specification can move 16 “Gigatransfers” (is that even a word?) per second.

We all know that Intel is launching a new CPU in the next few months to replace the 1366 socket and the X58 chipset. There is not a whole lot of detail around on this, but we can gauge the time of launch by the number of companies that are currently “launching” X79 motherboards.  If history is any indication we are within about 3 months of seeing a new CPU from the Blue Team.

Still things are a little different this time; when we saw the P55 and P67 launches the boards were flowing to the review sites and we had previews, unboxings, and everything in-between. We even had a stack of P67 motherboards about a month before the CPU arrived on our doorstep.  This time companies are being a little more… careful in how they send products out. I was not the only one to get buried under an avalanche of boxes right up to the actual launch date.

Now instead of flooding the sites with pre-production boards we are seeing the manufacturers themselves conducting the photo shoots and writing up the details. These are what the press has to talk about (unless you are lucky enough to get invited to a launch event at a company headquarters).  Still that is what we have to go on so that is what we will talk about now. So far we have heard from two of the larger competitors. Asus has pushed out their Rampage IV Extreme and shown it off to a select group of journalists. These lucky few got to see a board that while containing a complete BOM (Build of Materials) was not likely to work. Some have even been able to actual take a closer look at the board in person but those have been few and far between.

Next up we have a whole line of boards from Gigabyte. Not content to just launch one Gigabyte is showing off a total of four. These boards range from their top end gaming board the G1 Assassin 2 to their more mainstream X79-UD3 (stopping along the way to pick up the crazy overclocker on the X79-UD7).  

We really are looking forward to each and every one of these products. They are bringing a new socket, a new memory specification (not really but sort of) and much more. As we find out more about the X79 and Intel’s next generation CPU we will be sure you let you know. One thing we can tell you now, it is certainly not going to be boring.

Discuss in our forum

Not that long ago DFI sent me an interesting little board. This was their Mini-ITX  P55 LanParty board. Unfortunately, it died during testing (a choke blew up, literally blew up) but it was only the first of many that would begin to parade into the market.  Now sitting next to me is another Mini-ITX board, this one from GIGABYTE (and hopefully better made). It is their H55 version so it is really meant to run the Clarkdale series CPUs although it can certainly run any of the 1156 CPUs from Intel.

-- GIGABYTE Announces Winners of Pentium G6950 OC Challenge on HWBOT --
-- over@locker886 Takes Top Score for all 4 Benchmarks --

TAIPEI, Taiwan – July 09, 2010 – GIGABYTE TECHNOLOGY Co., Ltd, a leading manufacturer of motherboards, graphics cards and other computing hardware solutions today proudly announced that over@locker886 from Hungary was the winner of the Pentium G6950 OC Challenge hosted by HWBOT, scoring a total of 40 points by reaching the top spot in 4 different benchmark categories using a GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD7 motherboard.