Motherboards - Page 34

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.

We managed to get hold of exclusive pictures of the upcoming GIGABYTE P55A-UD7 motherboard. It's labeled as "EXTREME" at the moment, but that's because it's not the final shipping product.

From what we heard from our source, "UD7" is the new name to replace the "EXTREME Series" that GIGABYTE used with a couple of its recent products. Without knowing for sure, we would say that "UD7" is the new name because of the tremendous popularity of the new Windows 7 operating system. It's all about the number seven right now.

GIGABYTE has today announced seven new P55 based Intel motherboards which include a trio of the latest technologies that GIGABYTE refers to as GIGABYTE 333 Onboard Acceleration.

Late last week we gave you an exclusive look at GIGABYTE's upcoming P55A motherboards. We promised this week we would also give you a look at the upcoming GIGABYTE EX-58 EXTREME2 motherboard.

Asus loves its high-end customers. First they dropped out the "RoG (Republic of Gamers)" line as their high-end products, now they have their "The Ultimate Force" (TUF) boards.

The first of this new line of board is being called the Sabertooth 55i. This is going to be a P55 with quite a few unique features and improvements over even their RoG boards. The first is the implementation of what Asus is calling E.S.P. this stands for Efficient Switching Power. This is intended to provide clean power to the CPU and memory as well as the PCI-e Slots and controller (now on the CPU). According to the hard-sell from Asus it raises the efficiency of power conversion from 60% to an impressive 90%.

But the fun does not stop there.

Asus has stuffed in extra goodies like ceramics based heatsinks, direct memory cooling (with an optional cooling fan), "military-certified" MOSFETs, and more.

The new color scheme for the board gives it a decidedly military feel. I am sure this is to allow it to compete (in advertising) against Foxconn's military themed products. No word yet on retail availability or pricing but, given its redesign and high-end components you can bet it will not be cheap.

Last week we told showed you a couple of CPUz results for AMD's Magny-Cours K10 CPU. These had some interesting information but in reality did not tell us anything more than what we already knew (although there are rumors of thermal issues at full speed and 100% load).

Today we have a picture of the board that was used for the testing. This is a dual socket board that showed up as Dinar2 (Dinar is a form of currency used in the Middle East).

The picture does not show us much other than the name and the edges of the CPU sockets and RAM slots.

I have to wonder if the name is in anyway representative of the money that AMD received for the purchase of their foundry operations. If so that would be odd after all the money can from Abu Dhabi, a country that uses the Dirham as currency.

During the Intel Lynnfield and P55 Express chipset launch press conference earlier today in Taipei city, we managed to spot what we believe is an unseen motherboard from ASUS.

The ASUS Sabertooth 55i motherboard is obviously based on Intel's recently launched P55 Express chipset for the Socket LGA-1156 Core i5 and Core i7 processors and includes dual channel DDR3-1333 memory support.

What is interesting about this board is that it is part of the Ultimate Force brand from ASUS, which we have heard little about in the past. Sadly we couldn't find any ASUS reps during the event, so we are a little unclear on details, but you can get a good look at the upcoming motherboard in the video below.

That concludes our Intel Lynnfield and P55 Express chipset launch video coverage - we hope you enjoyed it!

We have more Intel rumors today. This one is surrounding the Turbo Memory successor Braidwood. Intel Turbo memory was a method of increasing I/O performance through the use of an NVRAM module. This feature showed up in a few notebooks but never really took off. On the whole the performance gain was not measureable so it was deemed as un-needed by many people that tested it.

Braidwood was supposed to bring this technology to the P55 in the form of the P57 chipset.

All of that is out the window if the rumors being reported are true. You see they claim that Intel is shelving the whole Braidwood project until a later date. This means that since the P57 is not much more than a P55 with Braidwood there is no reason to release the P57.

Of course again the problem with Turbo Boost (Much like Ready Boost) did not have any real measurable effect on performance. Did they help? Yes, they did but not in a way that was visible to the consumer. This coupled with rumored problems with the software side of Braidwood could be the main reason for shelving it for now. It is possible that like HyperThreading Turbo Memory will reappear when the technology is viable and the platform it is run on can really benefit from the technology.

With the lifting of the NDA on the 785 is not s surprise to see everyone announcing mainboards with this new chipset from AMD on it.

So it is no surprise at all that Asus has let slip what they have planned.

According to the Asus Website (and a small blur on Fudzilla) There will be three 785 boards that have support for the AM3 and one with AM2+ support two of the boards are the same model except for the memory and CPU support.

The models are as follows

M4A785D-M Pro (both AM2+ and AM3)
This is a microATX board that features the AMD HD 4200 IGP but no extra sideport memory. CPUs of up to 125W TDP are supported.

M4A785TD-M EVO (AM3)
This is a microATX board that has the additional 128MB DDR3 sideport memory and also support for up to 140W TDP CPUs.

M4785TD-V EVO (AM3)
This is a full sized ATX board that is identical to the M4A785TD-M except for its size and additional slots.

All of these boards look to be pretty good, but as we found out earlier today they will not have full 7.1 Surround from the HD 4200IGP. This means they will lose out over existing Intel and nVidia based boards for the high-end HTPC and SFF market.

Well if you were waiting for a new PCIe standard before upgrading you are in for a long wait. If you did not know that a new standard was due out and has now been delayed, well you are not alone. The PCI-Special Interest Group has announced that they are going to delay PCI 3.0 until sometime next year.

The new protocol would have enabled faster data rates (32Gigbits/second) and better (lower) power consumption. According to the PCI-SIG the new protocol is a bit more work than expected, but that is ok as, well apparently we do not even need it yet.

You have to wonder about these new standards that keep getting delayed. After all USB 3.0 got dropped for now, SATA 6Gb/s had stability issues and now PCIe 3.0 is being pushed back. One possibility is that slow economic times could delay development of products that can actually support the new interfaces. This would realistically delay adoption of the new standards by OEMs, but that is just speculation on our part.

Today we visited the Foxconn Channel office in Taipei and got a look at its upcoming range of motherboards to be released in the coming future. We got a look at what was being shown behind closed doors during Computex. You've already seen the Foxconn Cinema 785G board, now we get a look at a couple upcoming Intel boards.

Zach Ko, Quantum Force & Digital Life motherboard product manager, gave us an early look at its upcoming Quantum Force Socket 1156 boards based around Intel's P55 Express chipset for the upcoming range of Core i5 mid-range processors.

The Inferno Katana is the big daddy and comes loaded with all the features. There is a slightly cut-down version called the Inferno Katana GTI. The main difference being that the GTI only has eight CPU power phases and the Inferno Katana has 12. Each board has two dedicated power phases for the dual channel DDR3 memory. Both boards support NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossfireX.

We got no details on price or availability, but you can expect Foxconn to begin selling these one Intel starting selling the compatible processors to match the boards. There are plenty of exciting features on this board, especially to do with power. We look forward to testing it fully when it comes out.

Today we visited the Foxconn Channel office in Taipei and got a look at its upcoming range of motherboards to be released in the coming future.

First up Zach Ko, Quantum Force & Digital Life motherboard product manager, gave us an early look at its Cinema motherboard. It is part of the popular Digital Life line and is based on the upcoming AMD 785G chipset, which includes the DX10.1 ATI Radeon HD 4200 GPU. Overclocking is one of the features which hasn't been forgotten on this small board and there is an option in the BIOS to increase the graphics core up to 1100MHz - and that enables it to hit a 3DMark06 score of around 2700 3DMarks. On the Deluxe version of the board, 128MB DDR3 1333MHz onboard SidePort memory is included for an extra performance boost.

It's capable of supporting both AM2+ and AM3 based AMD processors and comes with Dual Channel DDR2 667/800/1066 support. There are a total of five CPU power phases to keep things stable and 100% solid capacitors are used as well as ferrite choke power delivery for basic overclocking and increased reliability.

Audio is a strong point with this board and that makes sense since it is targeted at users wanting to build a home theater PC. Surround sound 7.1 channel audio is added along with DTS CONNECT and Dolby Digital Live certification.

As far as price goes, Foxconn reckon it will go on sale at a little under $100 USD and it will go online in early August first in China and then around the rest of the world at the end of August.

Core i7 owners and prospects will be pleased to know that MSI has added more options for those that wish to go with SLI along with the Core i7.

While many motherboard manufacturuers are taking the time at Computex to show off motherboards based upon Intel's P55 chipset, ASUS is showing off a little bit more.