Intel's next best high-end chipset since the X38, the X48 will arrive as soon as next month and one of the first manufacturers to get ready for its release is non other than Gigabyte. The Tier-1 board maker already has the design ready as the new chip doesn't require much work so a few tweaks on the 'old' X38 design did the trick. The first pictures of the DDR2-boasting GA-X48-DQ6 have now reached the interweb and show that the board looks similar to the X38-DQ6. The cooling solution is full-copper and pretty discrete, the board has two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots with Crossfire support, four DDR2-1066 DIMMs, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight of USB 2.0 connectors and eight SATA 3.0 Gbps ports. The X48-DQ6 has 'official' support for the 1600 MHz FSB and should arrive by the end of the year.









Pictures courtesy of xfastest.com.