Motherboards - Page 33

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.

CES 2010 - On display at ASUS' booth was a new ATX form-factor motherboard based on AMD's 890G chipset, a known successor to 790GX with its performance oriented IGP.

Dubbed the M4A89GTOD PRO, the board supports 2-way CrossFireX (x8 / x8) discrete graphics, but also has an integrated DX10.1 compliant IGP (DX11 would have been nice, when's that coming AMD?).

In what seems to be a flashback to the Lynnfield/P55 launch we now hear that H57 boards from at least one manufacturer are showing up for sale in the Taipei computer market. The culprit this time is the Asus P7H57D-V EVO, the problem? Well the launch for this and the CPUs that support it are not until sometime in January.

What does this mean for Clarkdale and the new H5x chipsets? Well it can go one of two ways really. The first is the worse of the two scenarios as we start seeing Clarkdale Core i5 CPUs hitting the shelves in the same stores in Taipei. At the time of this writing that is not the case. The other is one where the boards hang out and are picked up by those wanting to get an early start on Clarkdale Core i5 and i3 CPUs.

But no matter which way it goes the Asus H57 board is a little higher priced that it should be. It runs for about $240. This is more than many P55 boards will run, but I suppose they are banking on the IGP on the CPU to make the cost seem more logical. The issue still remains that we do not yet know if the IGP on Clarkdale is worth the extra money or not.

For that we will have to wait for the official Clarkdale launch, or for some brave and enterprising website to push out a review early to get some extra page hits before the end of the year.

Intel's value positioned desktop chipset for LGA-1156, H55 Express is set for launch in Q1 2010 and a trio of H55 boards from GIGABYTE have been spotted online. These include the GA-H55M-S2H and GA-H55M-UD2H, both of which are mATX based, and also a full sized ATX board, the GA-H55-UD3H.

AMD have a successor to its current Dragon platform due out in Q2 of next year; this known as Leo. Two of the three individual components that make up this platform are the Thuban six-core processor and RD890 chipset (using the SB850 Southbridge).

A little birdy has kindly passed on some nice clean images of some various upcoming ASRock H55 Express based motherboards which are due for launch early next year when CES kicks off.

As you can see below, there's both mATX and full sized ATX motherboards being prepared by the company, and by the looks of it they're all in final form here.

The H55DE3 is a full-sized ATX variant with dual PCI-E x16 slots, a couple x1 slots and a couple legacy PCI slots.

Swedish website TechSweden has managed to get hold of images and details showing off a H57 chipset based motherboard from MSI. The H57 Express chipset is designed to support the Flexible Display technology which talks directly with the on-die graphics on Intel's upcoming range of LGA-1156 based dual-core processors in Q1 2010.

Details with pics have shown up on the web of ASUS' upcoming ROG series P55 board which they call the Maximus III Extreme. The board will make a showing by ASUS at DreamHack at the end of this month in Jönköping, Sweden where some of the best overclockers in the world get together and battle it out for supremacy.