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<font size="2">Today we will talk about the features and functionality of a small mainboard with huge potential designed by DFI that belongs to the famous enthusiast LanParty series. <br />
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<a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/dfi-lanparty-jr-x58t3h6.html">Read more...</a></font>
Our retail board arrived last week and now we aim to tie up the loose ends we left in our first look using the engineering sample (ES) board. The loose ends revolve around cooling, some more of the heavy OC stuff (for the intended audience), and functionality.
Not many people can afford a $449 motherboard. In fact, we seriously doubt anyone in his or her right mind would pay that much for a motherboard not installed in a server responsible for a company's business. However, there are the few, the proud, the extreme benchmarking crowd who swoon over products like this one.
We have spent a lot of time with this board. Probably too much time, once we looked over the logbook and thought back to the first day our early engineering sample board arrived in the labs. We were there during the development phase and stuck with it all the way through to its release. We never regretted the journey and sound like sentimental fools at this point, but it's not too often a product like this comes along in our business.
It is an interesting product and one we cannot put down long enough to write a ten thousand-word diatribe for it. This board is a beast; it makes no apologies for its cost, its purpose, or in your face configuration. It only asks that you have enough knowledge about overclocking to get the most out of it. That really is the crux of this board as it is all about overclocking.
For those not interested in extreme overclocking or wanting a trophy board in their pimped out case, there are much better values in the land of X58. Keep this in mind as our follow up today concentrates on overclocking and not general performance. The board performs just as well as any other X58 motherboard when it comes to running Excel or transcoding the latest movie. In 3D gaming, it is a couple of percent slower than the boards without the NF200, but that penalty is never noticeable without a benchmark.
If this is a deal breaker for you and you would like to play with the Classified design sans NF200, you will be pleased to know this option is now available on a non-NF200 model that comes in at a slightly lower price of $399. We cannot address the performance loss or overclocking ability of A vs. B at this point, as our non-NF200 Classified board has not arrived. However, we will hedge our bets that performance figures in most standard hardware configurations will be the same as what we have already experienced, with the NF200 GPU intensive stuff 1-2% behind the non-NF200. We think one advantage the NF200 board might have is in extreme overclocking as the load on the X58 is reduced, but more on that later.
For now, let's look at what the NF200 Classified can do in full retail form when teamed up with the right components and properly tuned.
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Today we are going to discuss a not very expensive mainboard with remarkable functionality that is targeted for overclocking fans.
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<font size="2">We continue checking out mainboards for new AMD processors that seem pretty attractive from certain standpoints. Read about the new solutions from Gigabyte in our review.<br />
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<a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/gigabyte-ma790xt-ud4p.html">Read more...</a></font>
We are going to use AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor to study the peculiarities and features of the AMD 790GX based mainboard with an integrated ATI Radeon HD 3300 graphics core. Read our new review for details.
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Today we are going to talk about the features of Asus LGA1366 mainboards and will see how they compare against the competing solutions from Gigabyte.
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At first ASRock solutions stood out due to an extravagant combination of seemingly incompatible processors, chipsets and technologies – all at a very affordable price. Now the company is offering solutions built on top-of-the-line chipsets that tend to cost substantial money.
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EVGA's Classified X58 motherboard has been a centerpiece of X58 discussions in various forums since the start of 2009. We managed to get an engineering sample board a few weeks ago and have some initial overclocking tests to show today. Let's take a quick look at the current layout and features before we have a look at a few early benchmark runs.
Our board arrived before EVGA finalized the stock cooling design, so we have had to resort to using third party solutions to cool areas of the board for these initial test runs. We are waiting on a retail board from EVGA before we comment on thermal performance and power consumption.
Hardware wise, EVGA added NVIDIA's NF200 into the mix that allows four x16 electrical interface PCI-E slots. As many of you already know, the NF200 is a PCI-E 2.0 x16 bridge-chip solution, which does add extra latency to the data transfer process. However, that's not a huge issue in the overall package.
This board is set to become EVGA's flagship board by offering a slew of extreme overclocking friendly features. This holds true for the 10-phase Volterra CPU power, 3-phase memory power, and 3-phase VTT designs to onboard jumpers that override cold boot quirks for LN2 cooling. The product focus is squarely aimed at multi-GPU enthusiasts and those that benchmark more for competition than fun. The slot configuration allows running three dual slot GPUs and a single slot PhysX card or other PCI-E peripheral. A PCI-E x1 slot is available for audio duties, even if the GPU slots are completely loaded.
This board is clearly for those with deep, deep pockets. The launch price is expected to be around $400~$450, putting it off the radar for most. EVGA provides a plug-in remote PCB, supporting power, reset, CMOS clear, a hex POST code LED display, on-the-fly VCore adjustment, and PCI-E disable jumpers. The remote buttons come in handy when benchmarking the board out of a PC case, especially when the lowest PCI-E slot is occupied.
A new addition that EVGA just completed for the final retail board is the presence of an onboard ROM that can store memory SPD files. The user can select at BIOS POST to override the memory module base SPD. EVGA has developed an OS software tool that allows users to interchange SPDs with one another if a particular SPD file known to offer superlative performance for a memory chip/PCB combination is available. Our test board does not contain this technology, so we will have to wait for the arrival of our retail board to test this unique feature.
We have been throwing everything we can at the board using the latest test BIOS. So far, things have been smooth during the test process, mainly because the EVGA X58 SLI board's launch has provided insight to the EVGA team and us in getting this board up and operating quickly. Peripheral compatibility has been excellent on this board. We have not discovered a single device that was not recognized or refused to work properly. S3 resume states have worked for us all the way up to 215 BCLK (as far as we tested to date), which cures a problem on the X58 SLI board.
Unfortunately, we still do not have an official release date from EVGA, but we expect it sometime in March (subject to change, obviously). At stock speeds, this board offers similar performance to other X58 motherboards in a variety of applications and games. Our short preview today will cover SLI gaming performance to see if the NF200 is a handicap and a few overclocking results using subzero and water-cooling, which is relevant as this board is targeted at the competitive overclocking crowd.
We are also providing a descriptive analysis of the BIOS overclocking options and how they work not only on this board but also on the X58 platform in general. We will follow up with a revised BIOS guide when the board launches. In the meantime, let's take a quick look at our results today.
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Today we will talk about the design and functionality of two newest mainboards from Gigabyte. We will dwell on the differences between them, find out what their strengths and weaknesses are, reveal their performance and power consumption.
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<span class="content"><font size="2"> It seems like ages ago when Intel released the P45 Express chipset. It was just last June, but that is normally an eternity in the personal computer market. We were not entirely convinced after our first look at the chipset that it could be successful. The P35 Express chipset was mature, less expensive, and a very popular choice for the first time buyer and enthusiast alike. Anyone needing high end performance for a CrossFire setup had numerous options to choose from with the X38/X48 based motherboards. What seemed like the final nail in the coffin is that board pricing was closer to X38 territory than the P35 and initial performance numbers just did not wow anyone. </font>
<p><font size="2">In fact, it seemed like the upcoming Nehalem platform was getting more press than the P45. Most of us were wondering out loud why anyone would invest in a brand new chipset based on a previous generation processor when the mother of all platforms was getting ready to launch. Not to mention, except for CrossFire capabilities upgraded from x16/x4 on the P35 to a performance friendly x8/x8 setup, what did the P45 really offer? </font></p>
<p><font size="2">As it turns out, this chipset had a lot to offer. Of course, the stars seemed to align perfectly for its march to success. After a few rough patches with early BIOS releases, this chipset became the favorite upgrade choice for the enthusiast due to its incredible front-side bus and memory overclocking capabilities. AMD released two of the best value/performance video cards in recent memory with the HD 4870 / HD 4850 video cards and all of a sudden you could run CrossFire on a mainstream board without spending a fortune. Intel pushed this chipset heavily and the motherboard manufacturers started pumping out various models from the low-end $80 market up to the high-end $250 sector. The P45 was everywhere and available at almost any price point. In fact, we last counted about 100 different models available from just about every manufacturer in the business. <br />
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It’s hard not to get lost in a sea of available models when searching the web sites at ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and others. Thanks to aggressive price cuts on the Core 2 series of processors and the Core i7 platform regulated to the high-end market until the end of this year, the opportunity for the P45’s star to shine brightly continues for the immediate future. Based on recent information from Intel we can expect to see the P45 around until 2011. </font></p>
<p><font size="2">All that said one of the industry leading supporters of the P45 chipset is Gigabyte. At last count, Gigabyte had fifteen P45 motherboards in their lineup. Gigabyte has already released six new P45 second-generation products based on their Ultra Durable 3 technology. We will be taking an in-depth look at the Ultra Durable 3 technology in separate article shortly. In the meantime, we will be reviewing one of the top models in the Ultra Durable 3 lineup, the GA-EP45-UD3P. </font></p>
<p><font size="2">This particular board offers CrossFire support in dual x8 mode, native support for DDR2-1366 memory speeds, a revised cooling system, dual PCI-E Gigabit LAN controllers with teaming, and Dolby Home Theater support via the Realtek ALC889a. Add in an integrated TPM data encryption chip, eight SATA ports, Dynamic Energy Saver power management system, and IEEE 1394a support plus several other features and you just bought the kitchen sink with this board. Speaking of buying, the current retail pricing is around $135 and a $20 rebate is available, meaning there is a lot of value packed into this blue wonder board. </font></p>
<p><font size="2">Did the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P impress us? Let’s find out now. </font></p>
<p><font size="2"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3508">Read more...</a><br />
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