Gigabyte announced the GA-8I955X Royal, the firm’s new flagship motherboard. The board integrates Intel’s 955X chipset for use with Intel’s Pentium Extreme Edition and Pentium D dual-core processors in LGA775 packaging.

Thanks to the 955X chipset, the board offers upgraded audio capability, supporting the ADAT format for 7.1 channel audio output. Gigabyte also claims its engineers enabled dual-channel DDR2 speeds up to 888 MHz for the GA-8I955X Royal.

Other features of the board include one PCIe x16 slot, two PCIe X1 slots, memory support for up to 8 GByte, dual Gbit LAN, six SATA II ports, three parallel ATA ports, as well as three IEEE1394b and eight USB 2.0 interfaces. Pricing has not been released. (THG)