UPDATE with new specs below!

You like motherboards, in particular motherboards for the upcoming Intel Sandy Bridge processors?  Good news then, we have pictures and some limited specifications on just that from Gigabyte.  The PR team sent out a wave of images and specifications but I thought I would just share some of the highlights and some of the higher end offerings with you today.  These motherboards are based on either the P67 chipset (for discrete graphics solutions) or the H67 chipset (for those of you that want to take advantage of the integrated graphics on the CPU).  

Gigabyte shows off more than a few Sandy Bridge ready motherboards - Motherboards 7
Gigabyte P67A-UD3R
  • 12 phase power design
  • On-board USB 3.0 connections (2 ports we can see on the back panel) and SATA 6G support
  • Matte black finish
  • 3x USB Power design that offer support for charging items like the iPad 
  • CrossFire support (no SLI logos to be seen here)
  • Two x16 physical slots though they will apparently operate at x16 and x4 speeds respectively

Gigabyte shows off more than a few Sandy Bridge ready motherboards - Motherboards 8 
Gigabyte P67A-UD4
  • 12 phase power design
  • On-board USB 3.0 connections (2 ports we can see on the back panel) and SATA 6G support
  • More of that Matte black finish
  • 3x USB Power design that offer support for charging items like the iPad 
  • CrossFire AND SLI support for multi-GPU goodness
  • Two x16 physical slots (no assumption on bandwidth here though I assume it is the same as the UD3 above)

Gigabyte shows off more than a few Sandy Bridge ready motherboards - Motherboards 9  
Gigabyte P67A-UD5
  • 20 phase power design
  • Four On-board USB 3.0 connections and SATA 6G support
  • Even More of that Matte black finish
  • 3x USB Power design that offer support for charging items like the iPad 
  • CrossFire AND SLI support for multi-GPU goodness
  • Three x16 physical slots – 1 @ x16 or 2 @ x8
  • Notice the additional chip being used here – could be a PCIe bridge chip like the nForce 200 to expand on the basic PCIe support of Sandy Bridge processors

Gigabyte shows off more than a few Sandy Bridge ready motherboards - Motherboards 10  
Gigabyte P67A-UD7
  • 24-phase power design
  • Ten (!!) On-board USB 3.0 connections and Six SATA 6G support
  • Still More of that Matte black finish
  • 3x USB Power design that offer support for charging items like the iPad 
  • CrossFire X AND 3-Way SLI support for multi-GPU goodness
  • Four x16 physical slots 2 @ x16 or 4 @ x8
  • Again, I assume the additional chip being cooled by the heatsink is for expansion of the base PCIe lane configurations

Gigabyte shows off more than a few Sandy Bridge ready motherboards - Motherboards 11   
Gigabyte H67-UD2H
  • On-board USB 3.0 connections and SATA 6G support
  • 3x USB Power design that offer support for charging items like the iPad 
  • Two physical x16 slots, two PCIe x1 slots
  • Only H-series motherboards will support video output with the upcoming Sandy Bridge processors
    • There are outputs for HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI and VGA, though I think only two are capable of running simultaneously

There is the quick rundown of some of the Gigabyte motherboard lineup preparing for the pending Sandy Bridge CPU launch later this winter.  I am quite sure more than a couple other motherboard vendors are preparing similar amounts of data and probably a lot more between now and CES so expect more and more leaks to trickle out.  One interesting note is this graphic on the motherboard boxes provided by Gigabyte:

Gigabyte shows off more than a few Sandy Bridge ready motherboards - Motherboards 12

Apparently Gigabyte is on track to help the enthusiasts get around any overclocking locks that might be the result of some features of the new Intel CPU architecture.  We don’t have any more details we can share today, but this is a good omen for those users that were worried about Intel locking down the enthusiast market.