Motherboards - Page 33

Yesterday we stopped by the ASRock headquarters in Taipei to check out a couple of their new goodies ahead of Computex next week and today we dropped into ECS who showed us a couple new motherboards that they will be showcasing at the big show next week.

Yesterday we stopped by the ASRock headquarters in Taipei to check out a couple of their new goodies ahead of Computex next week and today we dropped into ECS who showed us a couple new motherboards that they will be showcasing at the big show next week.

ASUS are doing something very different to anything we've seen before with their premium X58 offering, the Rampage III Extreme. The board in itself is nothing all that unusual for a high calibre enthusiast offering of today; all the goodies and then some are in place; albeit, the lack of additional NF200 bridge chips for 4-way SLI action is a bit of a minus if a rich geek is looking to go all out.

Details and pics of Sapphire's new Pure CrossfireX 890GX motherboard have surfaced. The board is full ATX sized and uses the 890GX+SB850 combination.

It's interesting that Sapphire has done away with its iconic white PCB this time around.

Looking out for the cream of the crop when it comes to choosing an 890FX powered motherboard for your new six-core Phenom II? - ASUS have quite the candidate in store with the Crosshair IV Extreme which the folks at Slashgear managed to get a bunch of pictures and info about.

Earlier today we were invited down to the GIGABYTE Technology headquarters here in Taipei where we were given an exclusive demonstration of its new "On/Off Charge" technology for the Apple iPod and other Apple products such as the iPhone and iPod.

The folks at bit-tech visited ECS' office in Taipei yesterday to see what the company has in store for budgeteers in the near future and caught a good glimpse of an AMD 880G based motherboard they've been working on.

We've heard a whisper of a new top-end X58 powered motherboard from GIGABYTE. The first sign was when a pre-release version was displayed in the specs list of a 3DMark Vantage run on the Orb that managed to break a world record a short while back.

The name? GA-X58A-UD9! A few tid bits have leaked out in recent weeks indicating GIGABYTE have been working on something pretty special here, but we'd never seen one in the flesh...... until NOW!

The folks over at GIGABYTE just clued us into this news and probably won't be happy we are breaking it before them, but that's news folks.

Using an upcoming motherboard known as the X58A-UD9 according to the ORB database, GIGABYTE were able to break the 3DMark Vantage performance world record by around 500 points and get itself right to the top of the list. GIGABYTE claimed in a recent phone call that they now have the "fastest desktop system on the planet". You can see the results at this page, which we managed to hunt down pretty easily.

The lucky folks at bit-tech were given a final retail sample of MSI's next stab at a board using the X58 chipset for them to check out in detail.

Dubbed the Xpower X58 which is part of MSI's new Big Bang line-up of enthusiast oriented motherboards, this one brings all the latest tricks to the table, including USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support, as well as support for Gulftown (six-core Core i7s).

We first saw the use of the Lucid Hybrid chip on MSI's new Big Bang P55 based motherboard which is a ground breaking bit of tech that gives the ability to mix up your graphics cards from different makers (NvIDIA + ATI) and still be able to harness the power of them both in a bastardized SLI/Crossfire type fashion.

Some images have surfaced on the web of a couple upcoming 890FX based boards from ASUS which go the full hog in features and power under its ROG series.

Dubbed the Crosshair IV Formula and Extreme, these two boards give the best ASUS has to offer in conjunction with the 890FX chipset; this including its own OC buttons, iROG and ROG Connect overclocking features and a specially designed cooling system to give better stability across the board.

Boards based on AMDs new 890GX chipset are starting to show up in final retail form on the web and ASUS has two models in its lineup readied up; the M4A89GTD Pro and M4A89GTD Pro USB3 (with the latter obviously including USB 3.0 connectivity).

In conjunction with the new 890GX chipset, these boards are of course AM3 socket based and use a 10-phase CPU VRM and 2-phase memory VRM with four DDR3 slots resident. 890GX also brings with it integrated DirectX 10.1 compliant graphics and AMD's SB800 Southbridge which gives SATA 6Gbps support (six ports). ASUS also includes a JMicron controller on the board that gives IDE support and an eSATA port on the rear I/O.

ASRock has announced a new P55 motherboard today which has it all. Dubbed the P55 Deluxe3, this board is one of ASRock's new True 333 series models which means it has SATA3, eSATA3 and USB 3.0 support.

With MSI's Big Bang enthusiast oriented mainboards fast gathering attention, MSI chose to keep riding the wave with the series and have thus introduced yet another model into the Big Bang lineup, the XPower.

MSI's marketing team recently invited 19 famous overclockers to Taiwan to do some first-hand overclocking on their new Big Bang Trinergy/Fuzion P55 based motherboards. Anticipation is high for this weapon and MSI had total confidence in seeing top notch results.

Whilst we've previously seen pictures of GIGABYTE's top of the line LGA-1156 based GA-P55A-UD7 motherboard as far back as November of last year, it is only now a confirmed final design candidate has been spotted which has several notable changes from the production sample we've seen previously.

Reminiscing of the dodgey capacitor woes occuring left, right and centre on motherboards of a decade or more ago, it's been discovered by Lars over at SemiAccurate that the same nightmare is potentially unfolding yet again, although not with regard to capacitors (thankfully they're solid state these days to ensure no issues with age), but rather the chokes onboard.

CES 2010 - One of the standout items being showcased at ASUS' booth is a final sample of the company's next flagship LGA1366 X58 motherboard, the Rampage III Extreme.

Some radical changes have been made to this board over its predecessor, the Rampage II Extreme. The biggest and most useful performance oriented change is this board's ability to run up to four double slot NvIDIA or ATI graphics cards with its well spaced out PCI-e 2.0 x16 slots. ASUS ensures there'll be no hindrance in the way of available PCIe lanes by including NVIDIA's nForce 200 chip and PCI bridge to assist in taking on four-card SLI and CrossFire.