Widescreen Gaming Forum

Pardon my absolute noobness, how or why are these supposed to be better motherboards ?

These are the upcoming Sandy Bridge motherboards due to be released the second week of January. There are a few notable things that are better about them, number 1 being UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) which replaces the BIOS.

This gives a very large number of improvements in general such as:
Being 64bit (compared to the 16bit BIOS) "which allows applications in the pre-boot execution environment to have direct access to all of the memory using 64-bit addressing."
Being able to boot from larger partitions (on the good ole BIOS we were limited to 2.1TB, UEFI Supports like 30805843420240240--ee0835034igngajn400 TB)
FASTER BOOT UP
etc etc.

Thanks DaFox, would it be too much to ask for some links that might explain its advantages to me pls ?
As I am updating my current computer in the coming months I am interested in knowing more to determine if its something I will find usefull, rather than selecting from what is currently available, or waiting for its release to make what is currently available cheaper.
As a broad question, I see only one MB in the pics above that supports more than 2 x GPU's, from a gaming perspective, are these MB's going to benefit (future) processing power of GPU's ? Based on the fact that the current breed of multi-card configurations are starting to be bottlenecked at the CPU without O/C ? (from my very limited understanding of how it all works... LOL) Or is that a totally stupid question that should get me a slap up side of the head for being a complete idiot.... :lol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface

Wikipedia has some good info on UEFI but as for other advantages to this board, there really are not all that many.

The new CPU's are expected to be somewhere around 15-20% faster than the current 1156 i5/i7's, certainly not worth upgrading to if you already own an 1156 system. This is rather low end stuff though, so all of the CPU's have on-board video built in etc.
Since it's low end the PCI-E lanes are rather limited. I wouldn't expect anything more than 8x/4x in Crossfire personally (Though 8x/8x may be doable.)

CPU Bound games are less of an issue if you're running at higher resolutions (which you should be with multiple GPU's!)