Introduction

Apart from producing high performance desktop processors which are undoubtedly the world's best, Intel also make chipsets and matching motherboards too. Although Intel's motherboard business aren't their strongest, they do however try to make the effort and have produced some decent motherboards in the past. Take for example their much talked about "Skull-Trail" extreme system (motherboard and processor combination).

As you all know, Intel have just launched their new Sandy Bridge processors this month. And with it, they've also launched their new motherboards containing their latest P67 or H67 chipsets, and features a new LGA 1155 socket design. Yes, new CPU means new motherboard. It's probably one of Intel's little strategies to get consumers buying ;)

I'm not sure if you are aware, but most of Intel's motherboards are actually produced by their board partners such as Asus, MSI and Gigabyte. And these three big brand names we've all heard of. According to our Intel representative, the Intel DP67BG (codenamed Burrage) desktop motherboard from the review kits are made by Asus. Now that's interesting. We've seen some great overclocking motherboards from Asus in the past, so will the Intel DP67BG be just as good?

OK, let's continue. Today, we'll be taking a look at Intel's DP67BG desktop motherboard - Extreme Edition Series. It's designed for the higher-end enthusiast market, and features Intel's latest P67 chipset as well as a new socket design ... LGA 1155. It supports dual channel memory upto DDR3-1333, XMP, Nvidia SLI, AMD Crossfire and all of Intel's innovative technologies. These include Intel's Turbo Boost, Smart Cache and Hyper-threading.

Let's take five and talk about the new LGA 1155 platform. Well, the new LGA 1155 processor sockets look identical to the older LGA 1156, except for two notches which are aligned differently. So this means you can't physically fit a older LGA 1156 processor into the new DP67BG motherboard. I suppose it does help system builders identify the which platform or processor they're using.

There some interesting features on the motherboard which is reminiscent of Asus. These include the onboard reset and power on/off buttons, 2-digit diagnostic LEDs, and "back-to-BIOS" switch . There's unique etched logo of "skull" which lights up from blue LEDs as soon as you switch the system on. The eye sockets has red LEDs which synchronously flashes with the hard drive access.

Armed with a Core i7-2600K processor, I'm expecting the Intel DP67BG motherboard to perform better than a Clarkdale/P55 combination. It will be interesting to see how good this motherboard is for overclocking.

We'll be testing the Intel DP67BG motherboard, using the following components, which includes obviously, the Intel Core i7-2600K processor (LGA 1155), a Geforce GTX 460 (1Gb GDDR5), 4Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR3-2133, an Arctic Cooling Freezer13 CPU cooler and a Thermaltake ToughPower XT 875W power supply. 

OK, let's take a closer look at the specifications and features of the Intel DP67BG motherboard Extreme Edition Series ...

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