Motherboards - Page 60

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.