1155 Motherboards - Dual channel?

LGA 1155 is dual channel... LGA 1366 is triple channel and LGA 2011 will be quad channel. So in others words, you won't see triple channel or quad channel on the LGA 1155 socket.

Like he said, the socket only has enough pins for dual channel (plus the CPU to chipset interface, sixteen lanes of PCIe, power pins, ground pins, etc.

The integrated memory controller on the LGA1155 CPUs have only two memory channels so you're not going to see triple channel on this socket's platform.

But is that a good thing? A bad thing? Or just a thing? It sounds like a step back for applications like multiple streams of HD video editing and maybe for game play. What am I missing?

It is indeed a bit of a step back for HD video editing, but not for games. 8gb of dual channel DDR3 is more than enough for any game. Sandy Bridge is a budget/mainstream chip, like the 775 or 1156. Ivy Bridge will replace the 1366 chips in Q4, which will then be your new video editting socket of choice.

Sandy Bridge has several design oddities that people seem to not care about (no tripple channel memory, an oddly expensive intergrated graphics component that few of their customers want, very limitted overclocking, a lack of 16x/16x pcie support, quicksync?) but I'm sure in a year or two we will look back and ask, what was that all about?

LGA 1155 is an upgrade over the LGA 1156 socket and thus carries the same design basics. Essentially, its a mainstream unit. It does provide a higher maximum memory count though (32 GB). There is LGA 2011 coming up which will be the actual successor for the LGA 1366. And it carries quad channel memory architecture.

Most of what I have heard right now is the triple channel memory doesn’t make that much of a difference at this time. The only area in which 1st generation Intel Core processors (like the Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition) are outperforming the 2nd generation Intel Core processors (like the Intel Core i7-2600K) is in applications that are heavily multi-threaded like video editing and that is because of the value of the 6 core/12 threads of those 1st generation Intel Core processors.

This is all very interesting. I consider myself only a part-time geek. I check in about once a year, re-learn all of this stuff in order to put my system, or a family member's system together and then I let wave of computer technology wash over me for the next year, until it's time to re-learn it all again.

According to all of the hype, articles, forums and benchmarks I've been seeing (even those including the 6-core processors), the i7-2600/2600K looks like it holds it's own. It's really just "mainstream"? I'm literally about to pull the trigger and configure my HD editing maching with:

i7-2600K (I'll probably let Asus do the overclocking automatically — if I get brave and if I trick the case out with enough cooling)
ASUS P8P67 Deluxe
16GB RAM DDR3 1600 (some have advised me this may not be stable. Why? What would go wrong?)

I was pretty convinced this is the system I should get. I mean there's always going to be something newer tomorrow (LGA 2011), but in this case, should I be waiting? I can put together a fairly complete and powerful system with the above components for around $1,200 or so. Should I be stopped?  

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/269162-31-recommended...