Motherboards - Page 67

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.

A little birdie sent us along some Foxconn marketing shots of the final revision of their X38A "Digital Life" motherboard based on Intel's soon to be released X38 chipset.

It is basically the same as the one we saw a few months ago at Computex in Taipei but here for the first time you get a first look at the final shipping revision.

We did not get a spec sheet, so we will just need to let the pictures do the talking and here they are...