New productsLast but not least, the products. The new technology will be implemented on both P55, X58 and 790FX-based configurations.
There's also a new mainboard series coming up, the UD7, which will feature the NF200 chipset to allow 3-Way SLI. Possibly just to have an alternative for the MSI Big Bang Trinergy. This is the only picture we took from the products as they are already available on the market.
Conclusive thoughtsThe new USB3.0 and Sata 6G standards do seem to offer quite a performance boost, but as long as there are no products available on the market, I'm not sure we can really judge about the value of these additions to upcoming motherboards.
The fact that Intel hasn't announced a new chipset using this new technology might be an indication of a slow introduction of products that fully use the bandwidth provided by USB3.0 and Sata 6G.
Apart from that, this also makes us wonder about the necessity of Sata 6G as a whole. As USB is easier to use and can handle enough bandwidth to not completely bottleneck any data-transfer, why would we need Sata to connect harddisk drives? I presume compatibility may be an issue ... (Editor’s note : compatibility, reliability, but most important: industry standards.)