A few credible sources have confirmed the launch date of Intel's upcoming Z68 Chipset, The launch date is confirmed to be 8 May 2011. Most of you are wondering what difference is the Z68 compared to the recently released P67/H67 chipset. As we already know that P67 allows for overclocking on Sandy Bridge CPU's but doesn't offer Built in GPU support and H67 is reverse of it.
The Z68 chipset would feature both - Better Overclocking as compared to P67 chip and also support Built in IGPs. Also we could see the sight of Z68 boards within the second week of may along with their prices. Z68 being an enthusiast based platform would see more ATX board than Micro-ATX.
Other features the new chipset will offer is the Solid State Caching or Smart response feature which would allow users to combine the performance of a SSD drive with storage capacity of a mechanical hard drive through RAID configurations which creates a common storage area where the chipset and Intel's storage driver ensures that frequently used data is placed on SSD, while the long-term stored data is moved to the mechanical device.
As far as the pricing goes, Intel did reduce the initial pricing of the chip and on release it would cost slightly higher than the P67 platform.
Boards Based on Intel’s upcoming Z68 Chipset revealed at CEBIT 2011.
