Month: January 2008

Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L @ Bjorn3D

“For the mainstream market there is P35, X38, soon to be P45 and X48 respectively. That doesn’t sound bad, unless looking for an Intel chipset with integrated graphics onboard in which case you get to decide between G31, G33, G35, and later G45 which will be a significant upgrade from previous Gxx chipsets. While plenty of choices are a good thing confusing the consumer is usually not. Not to mention not even the unreleased P45, G45, and X48 chipsets will be compatible with future Nehalem processors, but we digress.”

Foxconn X38A @ Digit-Life

“The Foxconn X38A is interesting because it combines two contradictions: being a top motherboard and being fit for memory upgrades. Both types of products have been manufactured for a long time already. But we cannot recall somebody trying to combine them.”

MSI X48 Platinum @ Trsuted Reviews

“It would seem that Intel was so concerned about the quad-core AMD Phenom that it was prepared to unleash the 1,600MHz front side bus a few months early and that led to a vocal demand for motherboards from reviewers in all four corners of the world. Strictly speaking the only chipset that should support the QX9770 was the soon-to-be-released X48 but they were very thin on the ground.”

ASUS P5K64 WS @ RBMods

“Today we take a look at a fully loaded workstation card from Asus. We recieved a sample of their P5K64WS that has HDMI, DDR3, etc etc features that we are going to take a closer look at. We decided to run some tests vs the P5K3 Deluxe motherboard that we reviewed in the past, we had some great luck with performance and overclocking when it came to that board and we don’t expect anything less from this board.”

Intel DX38BT @ Trusted Reviews

“Intel’s new DX38BT takes over from the BadAxe 2 D975XBX2 as the king of the Extreme Series line of motherboards. As the model code suggests the DX38BT uses Intels’s own X38 chipset, which supports the latest 45nm Penryn CPUs. However, there’s a fly in the ointment. The Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers have started to release BIOS updates that add support for a 1,600MHz front side bus to their X38 models along with support for 1,600MHz DDR3 memory.”

ASUS P5K Pro @ Elite Bastards

“The subject of this analysis is ASUS’ latest offering in their P5K series, the P5K Pro, which offers guaranteed support for Intel’s new 45 nanometre Core 2 CPUs to add to the feature set already on offer here. If you don’t want to shell out on an X38-based part, and a huge number of PCI Express lanes for full-on CrossFire support aren’t too important to you, then the P35 chipset may well suit your needs. How does the P5K Pro perform? Let’s take a look.”

ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe @ TechSpot

“After a longer than anticipated delay the new Phenom processors saw the public light last November, but unfortunately for AMD not even then things got back to plan. Put in simple terms, instead of getting a full pack of competitive products, we only got two moderately clocked Phenom processors (9500 and 9600) that are characterized for offering quad-core processing on a budget rather than outpacing competing Intel Core 2s.”

Foxconn X38A @ Legit Reviews

“In all a well rounded feature set for an X38 based board. And ringing in around $240.00 makes it a very decent deal when compared against similar X38 boards. The X38 chipset brings PCIe-Gen2.0 to the table, which in theory doubles the available bandwidth. But, if you look closer, Foxconn an even more interesting trick out of its hat. The board supports both DDR2 and DDR3 ram modules.”

ASUS Maximus Extreme @ Bjorn3D

“The Asus Maximus Extreme is one board which rewards you for your time and effort. If you like to endlessly tweak and fiddle with settings then you will have a field day with this board. Remember though that if you are new to overclocking than you will want to proceed with caution as the BIOS offers enough voltage to fry the board immediately.”

MSI & ECS nVidia 7100 @ TBreak

“New boards with “old chipset” are clearly aimed at SOHO users, but we also found them to be a great base for building HTPC configuration, especially due to addition of the HDMI support. Sadly, boards have no overclocking potential and the only setting worth mentioning on both boards is RAM voltage option which can be set manually.”