Intel X79 Chipset is $20 (€15) More Expensive than the X58

Those of you that have been keenly waiting for Intel to release the high-performance LGA 2011 platform should get ready to shell out more money out of your pockets as the chip maker has raised the price of the X79 chipset significantly over that of the previous X58.

Intel has reportedly set the price of its upcoming X79 Express chipset for LGA 2011 motherboards somewhere in the region of $70 US (€52), which is $20 (€15) more than what it asked for X58.

If we were to compare the two chipset it becomes clear that the X58 is the more complex part as its comprised not only from an I/O hub but also includes the ICH10R southbridge, while the X79 is a single-chip solutions since most of the traditional hardware logic found inside the chipset was moved into the Sandy Bridge-E processors.

Furthermore, the X79 PCH is about the same size as 6-series chipsets while it doesn't bring any new features compared to its LGA 1155 counterparts.

Initially, the X79 Express was supposed to include no less than 10 SATA 6Gbps with support for SAS drives as well as an additional PCI-Express 2.0 x4 link that directly connected the CPU to the storage subsystem, but these features have been dropped since Intel has been experiencing all sort of issues with the design of the X79 PCH.

As a result, Intel was forced to go instead with the Patsburg-A chipset which comes without any additional SAS ports thus limiting the maximum number of SATA devices that can be installed to six, only two of these working at 6Gbps speeds.

Together with the X79 PCH, Intel is also expected to launch three processors based on the Sandy Bridge-E architecture, the fastest of which being the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition.

The launch date of the LGA 2011 platform wasn't made public by Intel, but leaks suggest both the Sandy Bridge-E CPUs and the first X79 motherboards will arrive on November 14. (via VR-Zone)

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