Maximum PC

I am glad to see the new revised "B3" version chipset Sandy Bridge motherboards starting to show back in stock. I just looked on Newegg.com and found 5 socket 1155 motherboards from MSI and Biostar. Hopefully ASUS and Gigabyte will soon ship to vendors as well. I for one am overdue for an upgrade, and hopefully this will be it.

Is anyone else ready for a Sandy Bridge motherboard? If so, which one?

And saith unto them: Look again...and be pleased in the flock.

They're all back in full form with 21 to pick from. Back in business again!

More than ready. I've been waiting patiently for the MSI Big Bang Marshal since it was first shown in the new year.

When the P67 southbridge SATA2 glitch was announced it infuriated me, as I had no intention of using the SATA2 controller anyway. I don't use internal HDDs and any external SATA connectors I might use would be connected to SATA3 (6Gb/sec) to accommodate faster SSDs, so the SATA2 controller is unimportant to me. USB3 is more than fast enough for mechanical HDDs and external HDDs don't heat the system or burden the PSU.

It bugged me that I had to wait an extra month or two for all the goodness of eight full-sized PCIe slots and eight USB3 ports, just because of problems with almost obsolete technology.

My old Q6600/MaximusFormula is getting pretty long in the tooth but I didn't want to upgrade it until all the new specs were ready including USB3, SATA3, PCIe2, etc. The actual system still achieves a Windows Experience Rating of 7 which is probably fast enough for most of my uses but the lack of high-speed connectivity has long been a serious problem.

The performance increase of Sandy Bridge is a nice bonus. I plan to use the BBMarshal with an i7 2600K and 16GB of 2.4GHz DDR3. Hopefully it will last me four or five years like my last system and carry me through until newer specs with even faster data transfers are released.

NewEgg did a remarkable job of shipping replacement mobos out for us early adapters. I took advantage of their "use credit card to cross ship" so I was only down by 45 minutes or so while swapping mobos out. Same board but I did have to reactivate windows and Office. The 1st bootup Win7 loaded a bunch of drivers for my mobo contents and had me reboot. Oh, and of course I had to redo the UEFI(Bios) settings.

This is pretty silly. Are you on the level or should I pick this apart? I have the old buggy board, I'm going to run it without return, and I'm not miffed one bit. You have an internal drive and eSATA is not S/ATA of any flavor. 1.3W is too much of a burden for PSU's?