In January 2011, Intel launched their Sandy Bridge line of processors to a great deal of fanfare. Unfortunately, less than a month later, Intel recalled all Sandy Bridge motherboards due to the potential for degraded SATA performance over time, which was caused by faulty chipset logic. While this issue may have cost Intel over $1 billion, those days are behind us and the Sandy Bridge platform is back to dominating the market.
As we have come to expect with most new platform launches from Intel, we have a variety of new chipsets on the wide range of LGA 1155 motherboards. We have the mainstream P67 and H67, the lower-end H61, the ever-elusive B65, Q65 and Q67 and finally, the upcoming grand-daddy Z68 chipset.
Before we get to the chipset comparison, let us first discuss two of the unique features of Intel’s Sandy Bridge CPUs – integrated GPUs and overclocking. All Sandy Bridge processors, be it a high-end Core i7 2600K or low-end Core i3 2300, contain very-capable integrated GPUs allowing the system to output video without a discrete video card, however, not all motherboard chipsets allow for the use of this integrated GPU. Now, when it comes to overclocking, only CPUs with a model number ending with the letter ‘K‘ are capable of being overclocked, and even then, only on motherboards with a chipset that supports overclocking (check the comparison below to see if overclocking is supported).
So, we have a whopping seven chipsets to compare here, right? Well, not really. As the Q65 and Q67 platforms are not consumer-focused, let’s drop those from this comparison. Okay, let’s get to it!
Data sources: Intel Desktop Chipsets, Guru3D.com, and ITXGamer.com
The above comparison focuses on the features that we believe help differentiate the chipsets, but not all of the differences that exist are shown. For a more detailed technical overview of each chipset, I encourage you to check out the official datasheets over at the Intel website. Also keep in mind that just because the chipset doesn’t support USB 3.0 or only has 2x SATA3 ports doesn’t mean that your motherboard won’t provide additional features or have a greater number of storage connections – many motherboard manufacturers use additional third-party chips in order to provide these extra functions.
While H61, H67 and P67-based motherboards are available now, we should be seeing B65 and Z68-based motherboards sometime in May.
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