Intel X79 motherboards "leaked"

[dividebyzero]

Hard on the heels of the AMD 990FX/X boards showing their faces, are Intels X79 boards:

ASRock X79 Extreme4
and
Asus C1X79 EVO (dear god, change that PCB colour)
and
ECS X79R-A
and
Gigabyte X79A-UD3 (the -UD7 must have a built-in espresso maker)

 

[Tmagic650]

"leaked" is a bad word around here having had over 10 inches of rain in 4 days!

 

[Leeky]

Whats with the move of the memory slots?

I like the symetrical style of the pairs of slots either side of the CPU slot, but is there a reason for it other than cosmetics?

 

[dividebyzero]

Shorter memory traces at a guess, which would be very slightly more cost effective, lower latency, and probably helps with voltage control (I believe X79 is validating 1.25-1.35v modules).
Talking of the latter, it would seem that CPU cooler vendors are going to be ready should the new socket be populated by tall heatspreader memory modules

and

for example from Noctua (via VR-Zone's excellent Computex coverage)

Sorry for the size of the pics to anyone viewing via mobile.

 

[Mizzou]

The Asus board is just flat out ugly. Can't believe the size of that Noctua cooler, thought my NH-U12P push-pull in the X58 system was big. It’s always interesting to see this new tech roll out even though I'll most likely be on the sidelines spectating this time around.

 

[dividebyzero]

I'll be retiring (parting out) my secondary Q9400/P45 rig this time around while there is a reasonable amount of warranty outstanding on the components. For me, an update was going to come down to Bulldozer/990FX (high-end CPU and board) or SB-E/X79 (low end CPU). If BD had launched now along with the supporting boards I probably would have jumped on that bandwagon. As it stands now, it looks as though Bulldozer and SB-E will launch around the same time, so I'll wait until both are in the marketplace. I'm 99.9% sure I'll be going with SB-E non-"Extreme" 6-core at this point in time.