Lynnfield mobos on the march

Core i7 & i5, meet P55 & LGA 1156

Now that Intel's Lynnfield chips have been officially released, 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 and the LGA1156 socket.

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

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

Gigabyte offers six Lynnfield-capable mobos, each featuring the company's Smart 6 system-management utilities. Among the six smart utilities in Smart 6 is the nifty DualBIOS 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 line, six in its P7P55D line, and the single Nvidia nForce 200-equipped and less-than-modestly named P7P55 WS Supercomputer.

P55-based motherboards have also been announced by Jetway, EGVA, DFI, and undoubtedly others. ®