ASUS P5K3 Premium Black Pearl Edition @ OC Club
“When the time comes to purchase a new system, one of the things that you will purchase is a new motherboard. The dilemma you face is which one to get, and how much will it cost. AMD or Intel? Chipset? Manufacturer? Features? Oooohh, so many questions that it makes your head spin. New technology always brings along new hardware. That leads us to the subject of this article.”
XFX nForce 780i SLI @ Bit-Tech
“There are less partners involved in the reference design this time around, unlike with the nForce 680i SLI which had half a dozen typically graphics companies joining the motherboard fold to sell the same board. Instead, we have a far greater differentiation from a range of Tier 1 motherboard manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Foxconn with nForce 780i SLI.”
Gigabyte X48-DQ6 @ TweakTown
“Today we have a look at the Intel X48 chipset for the first time. While it has a new name, things haven’t changed; in fact, X48 is essentially an X38 chipset that has been hand picked to run higher clock speeds and to support the 1600MHz FSB CPU when Intel finally releases it sometime this year.”
MSI X38 Diamond @ HardwareZone
“MSI’s X38 Diamond succeeds its older P35 Diamond flagship motherboard with better overclocking and power efficiency, a more comprehensive storage solution and support for quad-GPU solutions. Other highlights such as Creative X-Fi audio and SkyTel VoIP are still there too. Check out the full review here.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”