Motherboards - Page 37

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.

First pictures of Intel's codenamed 45nm Bloomfield high-end desktop processor based motherboard recently appeared online.

It is an Intel Desktop Board brand motherboard which is quite different to anything else we have seen in the past. It is a very early sample so the design and layout will probably change throughout the year until the first Nehalem processors are due to launch sometime in the Q4 timeframe.

Intel is not due to officially release their P45 chipset until sometime in April but that hasn't stopped information being leaked early.

A recent event held in Taiwan which ASUS attended allowed an onlooker of the Xfastest forum to take a few shots of ASUS' upcoming P5N64 WS Pro motherboard, this based on NVIDIA's latest flagship desktop chipset; the 790i.

With NVIDIA's official unveiling of the 780i chipset a short while ago, a slew of manufacturers are coming out with boards based on this new flagship nForce chipset for Intel users. Below are three 780i boards we've spotted so far.

We begin with an offering from EVGA :-

Though NVIDIA's highly anticipated "nForce 780i" flagship desktop chipset is yet to be unleashed for the Intel platform, ASUS took it upon themselves to put details of their upcoming 780i motherboard on their website which will be known as the "P5N-T Deluxe".

The folks over at BCC Hardware managed to get their hands on an upcoming Nvidia nForce 780i SLI reference motherboard.

As you may know, this is the upcoming chipset to replace the aging 680i SLI chipset which lacks proper support for new 45nm processors from Intel.

Ok, ok, we tricked you, it's not actually Christmas lights, but we can't exactly tell you what the lights in the video below are for as yet, but this is an exclusive preview of a new technology that will be featured on just about every new motherboard from Gigabyte starting with their X48 boards which will arrive in Q1 2008.

It might not look like much in the video and we're sorry about the lens glare, but the conditions where we shot this video were far from ideal, as the room was some 40-odd degrees warm as the boards were being stress tested. The first board is revision 1.1 of Gigabyte's X48 board and we're not quite sure what the second board was, as it was too dark to make out the model name, but it's a combo board as you can see from the amount of memory slots.

As cool as the lights might be, they're not the actual feature, they're just there to give you an idea of how it works and no, it's not a CPU load indicator. The whole thing is really cool and Gigabyte is getting it patented and it's taken them about a year to develop it. Sorry for the large amounts of non-information here, but we had to swear not to divulge anything too early to be able to post this exclusive video.

So please bear with us and everything will be revealed in due time here at TweakTown. For now, enjoy the light show and good luck with trying to guess what it's really all about. Answers on a postcard please...

Here's a quick update with a picture of the X48 board, see the little row of lights? Sorry about the odd looking cropping there just had to cut out some messy cables and a few things that didn't look too great in the picture, so don't think there was something top secret that we had to remove. Well, at least that's our story and we're sticking to it.

As many of you would now know, Palit recently entered the motherboard industry with some budget oriented motherboards designed for the AMD platform. Today they expand their lineup with a couple of new boards based around NVIDIA's MCP73 line for Intel LGA775, these being the N73V with integrated GeForce 7050 GPU, and N73PV with integrated GeForce 7100 GPU.

You can learn more about each of the boards in the announcement here, as well as the product pages on Palit's website.

We also made time to visit our friends at ECS today who showed us their upcoming AMD motherboard based on the RX780 chipset - a cheaper and cut down version of the RD790 with a single PEG slot running at x16 full speed.

The RX780M-A is expected to launch after the first bunch of RD790 boards sometime mid October with a street price of around $100 - $110 USD. Pretty good for a brand new motherboard with Socket AM2+ supporting AMD's upcoming bunch of processors.

One thing we quickly noticed was that ECS finally decided to ditch the FDD (floppy) connector on this board and depending on how you look it could be either good or bad.

Here are some photos for your viewing pleasure! Take note that while the board is almost finished, the capacitors around the CPI area will be changed to 100% Japanese solid types and the Southbridge heatsink color will be changed to match the other cooler.

During our visit to the ABIT HQ today, we managed to snap photos of their upcoming Intel X38 chipset based motherboards. These shots are of boards which are almost ready for mass production.

Anandtech has got its hands on a Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 motherboard and has run some benchmarks on it. This is an early engineering sample and we're not quite sure why they bothered testing it, as looking at the benchmark results, the board is hardly any faster than the Abit P35 board that they've compared it to.

Although the board apparently was happy to run all the tests they threw at it, it wasn't a good overclocker and had to be run at stock speed. Although they managed to get some tests to run at a 510MHz bus, it wasn't stable enough, so the best they could do for a complete run of benchmarks was 400MHz.

Palit has moved into the motherboard market and has launched its first motherboard, the 945GC1066. It's a budget micro ATX board based on the 945GC chipset with a few tweaks which allows it to operate at 1,066MHz bus. It's compatible with all 65 and 45nm Intel Core 2 Duo processors and it has two DDR2 memory slots which supports 667MHz memory.

Other features include integrated Intel GMA950 graphics, Realtek 10/100Mbit Ethernet and 7.1-channel HD audio. It's got a single x16 PCI Express slot, a x1 PCI Express slot and two PCI slots.

Today we got the chance to visit the friendly folks at MSI and they showed us some of their upcoming products.

We got a chance to see their working Intel X38 Diamond motherboard but since it is not quite ready yet and waiting to be suited up with a new heat pipe cooling solution, we will hold off on showing you the board we saw today.

The board was a combo version with DDR2 and DDR3 DIMM slots but MSI has decided to remove the DDR2 slots due to RAM compatibility and performance issues. MSI commented that they may produce a combo board based on the X38 at a later date but they are still unsure when and if they will even do it or not.