Socket 1366 chipsets - what's coming down the road?

Question

Hi everyone.
I'm probably going to build a new rig in about 6 months to a year, and I intend to use the Socket 1366 architecture. However, one thing I have noticed at the moment is the lack of reasonably priced boards for that architecture. In short, the only boards available for that are ones with the Intel X58 chipset and they're mostly in the €250+ price range.
I ask because up to now it has been my preference to use an upper-midrange board with a high end processor - when I rebuilt my current machine about 2 years ago, I paired a K8N Neo4F Ultra with an Opteron 180 processor which cost a multiple of that (S939 Athlon 64 X2s were all gone).
Had I upgraded during the Core2Duo/Socket 775 era I would most likely have done the same thing.
The reason for that is that not only do I not see the value of high end (and high cost) boards where a midrange board is compatible with the same processor, as my Neo4F and presumably modern comparable boards at the midrange price point all have everything I need. In addition my Neo4F also has lots more of the things that I want, namely PCI expansion slots for adding cards, and less of the things I don't, like multiple PCIx16 slots for Quad-SLi and stuff like that, as I don't use multiple GPUs. Indeed, the new archictecture with it's hard TDP limits and integrated memory controller are going to limit the capability to overclock the CPU, so that's another 'use' for such a board gone.
However, from what I've read, Intel is going to segment it's desktop market with So1366 being at the high-desktop end, something like Socket 1160 at the midrange and something else again for high end servers. Can it therefore be taken that there will be no midrange boards for LGA1366?

Answer 1

Basically your waiting for socket 1156/1160 this is the mainstream Nehalem product that will be based on the P55 chipset.  As for when you are looking probably end of Q3 this year or more likley Q4.