Stephen X48 Roundup: ASUS, ECS & Intel @ TechGage
“With so much X48 selection on the market, choosing the right board can be tough. To help make the choice easier, we are taking a look at three such boards all at once, ASUS’ DDR2 Rampage Formula and also the DDR3 ECS X48T-A and Intel’s DX48BT2.”
MSI P45 Platinum @ Neoseeker
“Everything was fine until I tried to go over 450MHz FSB. It then became intensely painful, as most attempts would result in the board not posting – and even worse yet, not recovering, requiring that I clear the CMOS pretty much after every attempt.”
ECS X48T-A @ Guru3D
“Typically an X48 chipset based mainboard will start at roughly 250 USD. The two chips the mainboard manufacturer has to purchase from Intel total up towards 90 USD alone. Pretty high-end gear for sure as Intel’s X48 chipset brings support for the all new 1600 MHz FSB processors, two 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots, which you can use for ATI CrossFire, two ATI graphics cards and heaps of nice features.”
ASUS P5QL-E @ OC Club
“When it came to overclocking the Intel Core 2 Q9450 on the ASUS P5QL-E I ran into a few problems getting it stable anywhere above 2940MHz (420×7). Leaving all of the voltage settings on auto, I was able to get the FSB frequency all the way up to 400MHz with a multiplier of 7x. However, I did end up jumping to 1.355V on the CPU voltage to get it stable at 420MHz x 7 Multi giving me the speed of 2940MHz.”
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 @ Motherboards.org
“Performance on the QX9770 was exemplary, easily the fastest CPU or system I have ever tested with the exception being the dual QX9775 SkullTrail system which is faster, but of course that is with two CPUs that are virtually identical to the single QX9770 here. The QX9770 easily beats the Phenom X4 9850 CPU, but the two CPUs are in completely different price leagues and not a fair comparison as the person wanting a QX9770 will not likely look at an AMD CPU for their high-end computer.”
ASUS Rampage Formula @ Au-Ja!
“We really liked Intel’s X48 chipset when we first reviewed it using DDR3 memory. But DDR2 is still cheaper and plenty of customers would like to take their old memory onto their new mainboard. The ASUS Rampage Formula combines Intel’s X48 chipset with DDR2 memory and this combination looks very promising.”
MSI P45 Platinum @ TweakTown
“Today we have an early market sample of MSI’s P45 Platinum which is their top of the range board, this designed to compete with both ASUS’ and GIGABYTE’s ultra high-end P45 offerings. While it doesn’t have the full retail packaging included, we’ve confirmed with MSI that it’s the final revision board in our labs.”
Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L @ Hardware Secrets
“We took a look on GA-EP31-DS3L, a motherboard from Gigabyte based on Intel P31 chipset targeted to the mainstream market, coming with a lot of features and a relatively low cost. Check it out!”
Intel P45 Vs. X48 Crossfire @ TweakTown
“While there are a few differences between the two, we only cared about one of them. We wanted to know the performance difference between the X48 and the P45 when running Crossfire. While both boards carry two physical x16 slots, when two cards are installed the electronics behind the slots on the P45 tune back to x8 on both slots.”
ASUS Crosshair II Formula @ OC Club
“While going over this review I tried to think of something that I disliked about the Crosshair II and for once, I cannot find anything that is a negative about it. The price is on the high side, but considering the performance the Crosshair II showed and the wealth of utilities, extras, and addons, it is justifiable since you do get what you pay for.”