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Earlier today AMD announced its Phenom II X6 processors. One vendor even started offering them at a huge discount if you're willing to put up with a mail in rebate. The X6 is quite possibly the most affordable route to tons of threaded compute power. If you do a lot of video encoding or offline 3D rendering, for $150 you can't beat the deal TigerDirect is running on the 1055T. And it looks to be a beast of an overclocker.
The new X6s are supposed to work in all Socket-AM2+ and Socket-AM3 motherboards, all you need is a BIOS update. Many of you asked for a performance comparison between AM2+ and AM3 with the X6, but I quickly realized that none of the boards I had around the lab supported the chip. I decided to do a quick survey of all of the motherboard manufacturers to see who was ahead of the game on enabling Phenom II X6 support.
<p><span style="font-size: small;">Uncharacteristically late for ASUS, the P55 based Maximus III Extreme was rolled out to retail a couple of weeks ago.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> ASUS’s “M3E” follows in the footsteps of boards from EVGA and MSI, by teaming up nViida’s NF200 chipset to multiplex sixteen native PCIe lanes out to provide additional front-end bandwidth for multiple graphics cards and other devices. Overall, it’s not a solution that ends up high on most enthusiast shortlists because Intel’s X58 seems to be the logical choice and offers superlative performance in almost every way over the “lesser” P55.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> The truth is, we’re waiting on vendors to send us their second-gen X58 motherboards so that we can provide you with a round-up of which makes the best buy. As we’ve probably got a few weeks before things will be ready, a review of the M3E is the first of our time fillers, to be followed by a test of the mini-ITX ECS H55H-I next week. On top of that, Richard will be taking a look at Gigabyte's P55A-UD7 shortly, and we've also got AMD 890FX boards to squeeze in somewhere. Put simply, lots to do but so little time.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> Back to what's going down today, given the limited demand for $349 P55 boards, we’ll spare you any further drivel and get down to the facts...</span></p>
<p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3671/asus-m3e"><span style="font-size: small;">Read more</span></a></p>
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If you are impressionable and susceptible to depression, then you should probably skip this review. A mainboard with unsuccessful design and extremely limited functionality has a very oppressive effect and may seriously influence your state of mind and overall mood.
The H57M-ED65 is standard in many respects. It is a typical MicroStar product and a typical microATX mainboard based on the Intel H57 Express chipset. It has several minor shortcomings and no remarkably special features, but you can use it successfully even for overclocking.
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> It’s been a while since AnandTech featured a P55 board review, but while Intel is expanding on their high-end with $1,100 Core i7 980X CPU’s, their low-to-mid-range P55 platform is still the one on most people’s radars. Today’s we’re looking at two Intel P55 boards that fall under Intel’s “Extreme” series, the DP55KG and DP55SB.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> The “Extreme” series has historically produced one board per chipset so that Intel has an offering for those consumers with overclocking high on their agenda. This time round, Intel has gone for a couple of boards, their separating feature being the form factor – one ATX and one M-ATX.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3634/intel-dp55kg-and-dp55sb">Read more...</a><br />
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In our today’s review of the most extraordinary mainboard we are going to dwell not only on its features. We will also take a glance at solutions from other makers, reveal their peculiarities and discuss the existing tricks for successful overclocking of new processors.
Although we gave AMD’s 890GX/SB850 a lukewarm reception last week, there’s no denying that a sub $150 price point for a feature laden board such as the ASUS M4A89GTD Pro is deserving of closer inspection.
While most of the boards within a certain price bracket follow a common component formula, ASUS and ASRock have managed to segregate themselves by breaking rank and offering hardware level core unlocking for budget dual/tri-core AMD processors. That means that you can buy a sub $100 CPU and unlock it at your leisure to enjoy 4 core number crunching. The feature itself is not new per se, it’s just that AMD decided to drop support for ACC on series 8 chipsets, leaving vendors to do things on their own accord. ASUS’ workaround is almost certain to have upset AMD, but we think they made the right choice - if moving to the 8-series chipsets meant giving up core unlocking, many enthusiasts wouldn't.
If you take a look over at the blue corner (Intel), you’ll see that sub $150 expenditure almost exclusively limits you to the micro-ATX and mini-ITX form factors on the H55/H57 chipsets. While such motherboards are perfect in the context of small HTPC builds, there are times when users need increased levels of plug-in flexibility and future-friendly upgrade paths, and that’s where a full sized ATX motherboards start to make sense.
We’ve got a couple of AMD board reviews lined up for you this month, kicking-off today with the M4A89GTD Pro, as subjected to our standard test suite. Do note that we’re still in the process of bringing you a meaningful SATA 6G performance comparison – we should have a dedicated article up on this shortly.
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<p>It’s been a few years since we’ve written a full review featuring an Intel motherboard. The reason for that is simple; we just didn’t see some of the Intel boards as being competitive in terms of features, performance and pricing when compared to products from third party vendors. Probably not a good decision on our part because appearances can be deceptive... Take a look at our H55/H57 coverage and you’ll see that sub-vendors often struggle to get the basics right.</p>
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<p> <span style="font-size: small;">In hindsight, we should have added an Intel motherboard or two to those articles, because it would have been interesting to see how Intel measures up in the areas that truly matter. Better late than never we suppose, over the next month, we’ll be providing you with full reviews of three Intel boards; two are P55 chipset based, while the third and most exciting (if you like mini-ITX) is the DH57JG - formerly known as “Jet Geyser”. It’s the DH57JG that we’ll be looking at today; it should be on retailer shelves in a couple of weeks priced at around $125.<br />
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<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3752">Read more...</a><br />
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<p>For most of us, Zotac isn't the name that comes to mind when thinking about your next motherboard. Instead, brands like ASUS, Gigabyte or MSI are closer to the tip of your tongue. For HTPC users however, that all started to change with the release of several mini-ITX motherboards based on NVIDIA's GeForce 9300 and ION chipsets. Despite its initial teething problems, the Zotac ION ended up being the perfect motherboard for a DIY low powered HTPC capable of full 1080p video playback.</p>
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<p> <span style="font-size: small;">If you needed more CPU power, Zotac offered the LGA-775 socket GeForce 9300-ITX-WiFi. You got the same mini-ITX form factor, but support for Core 2 CPUs instead of the on-board Atom that its ION boards were limited to. With the release of Intel's first 32nm dual-core processors earlier this year, Zotac wanted to offer an updated platform for SFF or HTPC users who didn't want to sacrifice CPU performance. Based on Intel's H55 chipset and supporting the entire line of Core i3, i5 and LGA-1156 i7 CPUs, Zotac sent us its latest mini-ITX board: the H55-ITX WiFi.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3753" target="_blank">Read more...</a><br />
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<p><span style="font-size: small;">Manufacturers of miniature nettop mainboards offer solutions equipped with single-core as well as dual-core Intel Atom processors. However, are the differences between these two modifications really so significant? We tested two ION platforms and tried to answer this seemingly obvious question.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/zotac-ion-itx-a.html">Read more...</a><br />
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