Next month, together with the already popular and almost infamous P45 chipset, Intel will be introducing the P43. The new lower-mid-range chip will have features similar to those included with the P45 with the exceptions being "official" support for CrossFire and DDR3 beyond 1066 MHz. Still, with a price tag of about $34, the P43 should make for some pretty cheap and decent-performing motherboards although most manufacturers will try to impress with their P45 models.

After seeing quite a few P45-powered boards we can now "admire" one early sample of a P43 product. Made by a not so well-known Chinese manufacturer the board below is dubbed P43T and it comes with support for 65 and 45nm CPUs with 1333 MHz FSBs, has DDR2-1066 memory slots, two PCI-Express 2.0 slots with one being x4 electrical (CrossFire may be enabled by the manufacturer) and some six SATA 3.0 Gbps ports. The sample board lacks a cooling solution but has quite a few USB 2.0 ports, one Gigabit Ethernet connector and 7.1 channel audio. The board should become available before the official announcement of the P43 chipset, before the end of this month.









Pictures courtesy of zol.com.cn.