The crew over at Tom's Hardware is taking an exclusive look at a fully assembled Nehalem system that consists of a FOXCONN X58 motherboard and a Nehalem CPU. Details on the platform and the new architecture are already well detailed so I'll skip them. It's the motherboard that's cool and worth looking. That's FOXCONN's reference board powered by Intel's X58 chipset and ICH10-R southbridge, the same used on today's Intel P45 platforms. ICH-10 supplies up to four PCI Express x16 paths, of which two, are PCI Express 2.0. FOXCONN's Renaissance board also allows up to 24GB of DDR3 memory to be installed on 6 slots. With Nehalem, the memory is running in triple-channel mode (the name is pretty self explanatory). Initially the motherboard will support DDR3-800, 1066 and 1333 configurations. The Renaissance also has six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, Realtek ALC888S 7.1 channel audio and a Gigabit Ethernet. Speaking to the other motherboard features, they include the usual heatpipe cooling for the chipset, solid ultra-low SR capacitors, debugging LED lights, clear CMOS button round the backplate and a six-phase power circuit design. Expect benchmarks and price information when the official launch date of Nehalem approaches.


Source: Tom's Hardware