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Most motherboard vendors chose Computex as the ideal platform to showcase their upcoming products for the upcoming Intel LGA-1156 processors. The Intel booth was decked up wall-to-wall with Intel 5-series motherboards, some of which, made it to cameras for their unusual designs. Take for instance, the Shuttle SP55H7. This board uses a custom form-factor to fit into the company's bare-bones systems. The socket is slanted, and surrounded with an unusual mount-hole arrangement for the cooler, which again, could be of Shuttle's own design. This is, perhaps to make the most out of the available PCB area.

A more popular motherboard vendor, MSI showcased the first M-ATX motherboard for the platform we have seen so far, the H57-ED65. Based on the Intel H57 chipset. The socket is powered by an 8-phase DrMOS power circuit. MSI takes care of the basics for this platform, providing a PCI-E 2.0 x16, one PCI, and two PCI-E x1 slots. The dual-channel DDR3 memory slots neighbour one NVRAM slot. Apart from the six SATA II ports the H57 provides, a second controller drives the IDE connector, and perhaps, one or more eSATA ports. The rest of the 'wall' can be viewed here. By the looks of it, Intel made sure a full-fledged lineup of motherboards are available to the consumers when it kicks off the series of LGA-1156 processors, and there is every indication that the new platform won't have much trouble replacing the current LGA-775 series.



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