Motherboards - Page 36

ASRock are feeling rather generous at the moment, and as such they have decided to fire up a P43/P45 motherboard Lucky Draw! - If you're excited about the prospect of picking up a new ASRock P45 or P43 based motherboard for free, you'd be silly to turn your back on this one.

Foxconn has today taken the covers off its newest motherboard and it comes under their new Green Series of products.

It will be a rather affordable motherboard based on Intel's G31 Express chipset with onboard GMA 3100 graphics and support for the latest Core2 Quad and Core2 Duo processors up to 95W power rating and FSB rating of 1333MHz.

One of the motherboards you'll get a look at Computex next month in Taipei is the GIGABYTE MA79GP-DS4H and it is based on AMD's upcoming 790GX chipset.

It of course supports all AM2+ processors and DDR2 memory and gets five phases of power and from the looks of things; it appears to be using all solid capacitors made in Japan.

ECS alerted us this morning about its latest motherboard - this one is right at the high-end of the list and we are talking about the X48T-A Black Series motherboard based on Intel's X48 Express chipset.

It includes support for Intel 45nm processors as well as Core2 Extreme Quad-Core processors, Intel XMP DDR3 memory technology, ATI CrossFire dual graphics (two PCI Express 2.0 X16 slots running at full x16 speed) and features ECS Qooltech II silent cooler, dual Gigabit LAN and Ultra I/O Rear Panel.

The folks over at DeviceVM certainly have something to grin about - ASUS has just announced that it will include its Splashtop instant-on Linux OS software as part of its Express Gate feature on all upcoming motherboards starting with the P5Q family.

While Express Gate is not entirely new, it has seen some changes now. Instead of having to run the software off a HDD or pen drive (where you might as well just use Ubuntu), this time the boards will have a dedicated memory chipset linked to the BIOS. Turn on your system and within a second or so, you have an OS to play around with.

The type of setup is probably more suited to notebooks, but if you are only interested in web browsing, you could save a bucket of cash not having to pay for Vista or waste time setting up another Linux operating system, as it is there ready to go. The video below which was uploaded to YouTube below explains how Splashtop works.

There's been a fair chunk of info and images floating about recently in reference to Intel's next big chipset to hit the market, that being P45. You would have seen our exclusive Gigabyte Spring Break coverage a couple days ago which showed off some P45 related goodness, and there's been several sightings in the way of upcoming P45 boards from various vendors recently as well.

Last week we showed you the world exclusive pictures of Gigabyte's EP45 Extreme and this week we thought we'd follow up with some more P45 motherboards from Gigabyte. First up we got the EP45-DQ6 which will be Gigabyte's flagship P45 based motherboard and unlike the Extreme, this is a normal retail board targeting high-end users looking for something out of the ordinary. It can't compete with the Extreme when it comes to chipset cooling, but it has a fair few extra features that you won't get with the Extreme board.

Foxconn has today launched the second motherboard in its Quantum Force series and it's a ripper.

BLACKOPS is the name and this mighty motherboard may even make the most serious of overclockers cringe. It is based on Intel's new X48 Express chipset and is targeted specifically at overclockers. Out of the box, it includes a 4-in-1 chipset cooling arrangement that allows for regular air cooling as well as water cooling and even LN2 or dry ice.

AMD is set to release its next chipset next month and it is the 790GX. You could think of it as a 790FX with onboard graphics, Radeon HD 3300 to be exact. It's a faster onboard graphics solution than the 780G which uses Radeon HD 3200. It even includes a memory chip onboard using Side-Port Memory technology.

Rumors are floating around that the 790GX will support CrossfireX (not full speed but half speed two x8 slots) as well as Hybrid Crossfire to reduce power consumption and boost performance when teamed up with a discrete graphics card such as the Radeon HD 3450.

ABIT, once the mighty king of all motherboard manufacturers, is still in the game and has just announced its A-S78H AM2+ motherboard based on AMD's 780G chipset.

It doesn't seem to include anything overly spectacular besides the AMD chipset features such as Hybrid Crossfire. It does manage to fit in not only a DVI and VGA port but also HDMI.

It would have been nice to see an optical out port for digital audio but I guess HDMI is going to take over from that soon enough for newer HD audio such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD.

MSI has just announced its latest Socket 775 motherboard supporting all new 45nm Intel processors called the P7N2 Diamond.

It is based on Nvidia's high-end NForce 790i Ultra SLI chipset and uses a non-reference design which is a fresh change from all the other reference based boards from companies like XFX, EVGA and BFG.