The launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge (mainstream at first) processors is getting closer, and with it comes a new CPU socket, and a new motherboard chipsets. The first photo's on P67 chipset based motherboards have been floating around the web for a while now. ECS is also working on a few of these motherboards and is making sure that both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards work combined together. yep, they are adding a Lucid Hydra chip like some of the competition.

Now we are not keen on the extra chip at all, as overall experiences with Hydra are far from impressive and user friendly.

The motherboard we refer to is the P67H2-A based on the upcoming socket LGA 1155 is which is powered by a 14-phase VRM.

The motherboard comes with three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (x16, x16, NC / x16, x8, x8 most likely) as well as a pair of PCI Express x1 and two PCI slots. The motherboard also shows dual Gigabit Ethernet and two NEC USB 3.0 controllers that will bring you a total of four USB 3.0 ports. We also can see six SATA 3 Gbps ports and two SATA 6 Gbps controllers (for two internal ports) and a number of USB 2.0 ports, plus eSATA. The colleagues over at BitTech snagged a photo of this unit, have a peek (click on the thumbnail).