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<p><span style="font-size: small;">In the world of motherboards and manufacturer competition, the idea is to beat your competitor. To develop the product, with more features, more fancy gadgets, and perform better than your competitor at every price point. Today, we pit arguably the two most popular motherboard vendors at a price point that will see a significant number of sales from consumers and enthusiasts alike – the <strong>ASUS P8P67 Pro</strong> and the <strong>Gigabyte P67A-UD4</strong>, which were both released during the Sandy Bridge week for $190. Forget all the marketing fluff; this is a showdown!</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/4130/the-battle-of-the-p67-boards-asus-vs-gigabyte-at-190">Read more...</a><br />
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Back in August 2010, AnandTech published its Sandy Bridge preview—an in-depth examination designed to tantalize consumers and industry alike as to what Intel’s latest production has to offer. I would like to review some of the major points as an introduction to the platform.
As you would expect, the new socket 1155 processors are incompatible with socket 1156 motherboards. The new motherboards will come in H and P varieties, with the H series taking advantage of the graphics on the processor die, whereas the P series will utilize discrete graphics only. At launch, both P67 and H67 chipsets will be available, with the H61 chipset released during Q1 2011.
Despite losing the on-chip graphics with the P series, these boards will support dual PCIe lanes running at x8 speed. The PCIe lane bandwidth of the new chipset is double that of previous Intel chipsets, firstly to increase correlation with chipsets, but also to help support SATA 6 Gb/s which runs over PCIe 1x, and future movement into USB 3.0.
The P/H67 chipsets will natively support two SATA 6Gb/s ports, with the possibility of some manufacturers adding an NEC/Marvell/Etron chip to increase this to four. Four SATA 3Gb/s will be included as standard. No USB 3.0 native support is included, much to the disappointment of some consumers, but again manufacturers at their own discretion can add an chip to give a couple of ports in the back panel, or a few more through onboard headers. USB 2.0 is provided copiously, with at least 10 ports available across the range, through either the back panel or onboard headers.
This mainboard has no specific technical advantages over the previously reviewed mini-ITX LGA1156 mainboards. However, we didn’t find any serious drawbacks either. Instead, the board sports one important advantage: it sells at the lowest price of all.
Asus designed M4A88T-I Deluxe Mini-ITX mainboard for Socket AM3. With this mainboard and energy-efficient Athlon II processors we put together a unique system: compact, fast and energy-efficient and built using only AMD components.
Inexpensive mainboards built with super-reliable components, furnished with 5-year warranty, equipped with advanced cooling system and featuring extensive functionality due to a number of additional onboard controllers simply do not exist. Except for one single product from Asus, which we are going to discuss in our today’s review.
This mainboard belongs to the value segment only formally. It barely differs from the top model in the lineup, almost all of its functions remained the same. Its functionality is even much more extensive than that of many mainboards from other manufacturers. The only feature that allows us to consider it a Value product is its price.
Today we are going to talk about a very attractive mainboard with rich functionality and features, which may be a great option to consider if you are looking for an LGA1366 platform.
This product is based on Intel X58 Express chipset, supports Nvidia 3-Way SLI and ATI Quad-GPU CrossFireX configurations, features all necessary interfaces including IEEE1394, USB 3.0 and SATA 6 Gbps, but is available at a very affordable price.
In this roundup we are going to discuss the features and functionality of four Socket AM3 mainboards based on AMD 870 chipset: Asus M4A87TD EVO, Biostar TA870+, Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 and MSI 870A-GD54. In reality, however, we tested eight different mainboards.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">The first thing that comes to mind when looking at the images of the Biostar TP67XE board is one of space. The motherboard is seemingly devoid of a lot of clutter around the PCI slots. <br />
With regard to the PCI slots, we often criticize Biostar of getting the configuration wrong - 4 PCIe followed by 2 PCI, for example on their TA890FXE. This time, they’ve made an effort - a PCIe x16 (x8 in CrossFireX), followed by two PCIe x1, then a PCIe x8, and two PCI. Thus if you fill both PCIe slots with dual slot graphics cards, there’s still a PCIe and a PCI available. It’s a step in the right direction, sure, but there’s a better layout we would prefer (switch the first two, and also the PCIe x8 with the next PCI), meaning only the PCI card will have to deal with any direct heat from a dual GPU setup. Aside from this, the livery is the distinct white and orange we’ve come to expect from Biostar. Just don’t go mixing up the second PCIe with those PCI - which are both orange. No matter how hard you try and jam a card into the wrong slot, something will end up breaking.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3950/a-quick-glimpse-of-the-biostar-tp67xe-and-th67xe">Read more...</a><br />
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