Motherboards - Page 59

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.