<span class="content"> <p><font size="2">To say we stirred up a hornet&rsquo;s nest with our original article concerning the problems we encountered running the AMD 9850BE on several 780G motherboards would be an understatement at best. Our conversations with AMD and the motherboard suppliers have been numerous, educational, and at times almost as spirited as the election year debates. Fortunately, we are finally at the end of a very long and winding road with this subject. Maybe not exactly the end, more like a new beginning in many ways. </font></p> <p><font size="2">In our last blog, we discussed the quandary that the motherboard suppliers have in meeting a price target and still offering support of the wide breadth of products from the processor manufacturers. Quite honestly, being a product engineer on a IGP product that has multiple usage design criteria and must meet the strictest of price targets is not something we would want to do ourselves. However, about 90% of the motherboard requirements in the consumer market fall into this category so suppliers have to get it right.</font></p> <p><span class="content"> <p><font size="2">In this case, getting it right means full support for the current AMD processor offerings or specifically stating processor support on the various 780G products. Our primary concern was/is ensuring verification of what the various suppliers state their product should do once it reaches the user. In this case, we were concerned about CPU support, both from a board and chipset perspective. The 780G, without question, fully supports the 125W TDP processors at stock or overclocked settings. Finding a board that will do it is a little more difficult. </font></p> <p><font size="2">Of the boards that we have retested the last two weeks, three now claim full support for the 125W TDP processors. These include the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H, Jetway PA78GT3-DG, and ASRock A780FullDisplayPort, all of which passed our test regimen. We have two other boards that do not implicitly state support for the Phenom 9850BE, but we found the Biostar TForce TA780G M2+ and Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G worked fine (<em>read fine print next)</em>. </font></p> <p><font size="2">Let&rsquo;s take a quick look at our results.</font></p> <p><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3299"><font size="2">Read more...</font></a><br /> </p> </span></p> </span>

<span class="content"> <p><font size="2">After a very successful DFI P35 T2R motherboard launch, DFI endeavored to apply the same level of engineering expertise to Intel's X38/X48 chipsets. We did not review the DFI X38 motherboard, but instead decided to look at the X48-based motherboard from DFI in DDR2 form. Finally, after a slew of delays, Intel's X48 chipset is available in large enough quantities to manufacturers to allow full retail rollout. Intel delivered the initial batches of X48 chipsets to preferred launch partners such as ASUS and Gigabyte who were first to market, but now we are seeing this chipset in boards from other suppliers.</font></p> <p><font size="2">Expectations placed on the LANParty series from DFI are always high, but it has become more difficult for companies like DFI to stay ahead of the pack as boards from ASUS's ROG line have also begun to employ many of the additional BIOS functions that provided DFI with elite status among overclocking circles in the past. Although some of the competitors are now within a whisker of DFI's approach to BIOS options, a slight gap still remains in ultra fine voltage and memory clock skew control ranges; these allow users to dial in the last few MHz of stability while using lower levels of memory and chipset voltages (with some perseverance).</font></p> <p><font size="2">While this level of control to return ratio may not interest most users, DFI still enjoys a loyal following of people who regard tuning a DFI BIOS as a hobby and notable pastime. This does not mean that DFI's current boards only favor users who have vast levels of BIOS tuning experience or masses of time. In fact, DFI has improved the auto default settings of their boards considerably over the past year. So much so, that it is now no longer necessary to hold a masters degree in BIOS manipulation just to get the boards to boot and work in a stable manner. Online communities serve to provide additional information for those who are just starting out and want to learn more about the finer tweaking options that DFI provides.</font></p> <p><font size="2">In spite of DFI making these stock setting 'ease of use' advancements, we still have to concede that users of a 'tweaking' oriented mindset will lean towards this kind of motherboard. If instead you subscribe to the belief that all boards are the same, or if fine tweaking options do nothing to float your boat, there's a whole host of sub-$200 motherboards based on Intel's P35 chipset that fill the role of a good overclocking board perfectly. Boards priced above $200 must fight fiercely not only to provide masses of BIOS options and functionality, but also justification for their price tag against a competitively priced product. Ultimately, the boards are often so closely matched that winners emerge based upon the ease at which a user can attain high FSB speeds that can be run in a stable manner. The question is: can DFI topple ASUS's X38/X48 DDR2-based boards such as the Maximus Formula and superlative Rampage Formula?</font></p> <p><span class="content"> <p><font size="2">Interested to learn as much as we could about this X48-based offering, we spoke with DFI recently about their latest foray with Intel's chipsets. We were surprised to learn that Intel did not provide much support to DFI when it came to revealing the nature and use of performance related chipset registers that are available for manipulation via BIOS coding. So here, we have Intel claiming to be overclocking friendly on one hand and yet failing to provide full support to a key enthusiast manufacturer on the other. We are told this situation is set to improve - and rightly so. With rapid changes in processor architecture, B-tier manufacturers need all the support they can get to reduce development time and cut research costs in order to provide a competitive product in the market.</font></p> <p><font size="2">With release of Intel's P45 looming, DDR2-based X48 boards have their work cut out, especially if the P45 improves in areas such as low voltage requirements, reduced thermals, and tRD performance along with FSB overclocking headroom. If these conditions are met, a trump card of dual 16x PCIE slots on the X38/X48 chipsets may not hold enough allure to prevent users from looking at the P45, which can be simply teamed with any single slot dual-GPU solution to provide similar performance.</font></p> <p><font size="2">Reader feedback regarding our extensive BIOS guide on the DFI P35 UT T2R was very positive and we are back with a similar level of information today. Luckily, for us, the BIOS on the X48 board we are reviewing today bears many functional and naming similarities to the DFI P35 board - only the ranges really need changing, together with some additional work on the VTT/GTL reference voltage tables to get the most from it.</font></p> <p><font size="2">In keeping with our quest for continual improvement, we will present our first video BIOS setup guide that can be viewed easily if your computer has the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player loaded. We really feel that this will help users who have never used a DFI BIOS to obtain a reference point for setup when overclocking the latest dual-core CPUs from Intel. We will provide quad-core results shortly and look forward to your comments and suggestions with the new format. In the meantime, let's look at the DFI X48 LT T2R and see what this board offers for the enthusiast.</font></p> <p><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3294"><font size="2">Read more...</font></a><br /> </p> </span></p> </span>

<div><font size="2"><span class="content"> <p>NVIDIA introduced the 790i product line just a few short weeks ago and ASUS is one of the first on the scene with their product offering. ASUS is taking a distinct twist on things, this time with their brand new 790i Ultra board, the ASUS Striker II Extreme. Truth be told, we had this board in our possession before the 790i launch, but decided to give it the full guide treatment during testing. Interestingly enough, we were just getting comfortable with the idea of crowning Intel's X48 the winner for the next generation of desktop chipsets when NVIDIA managed to reappear out of nowhere with their 790i (Ultra) MCP in tow.</p> <p>Our first impressions, stemming from our time with an EVGA NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard, left us feeling as if Intel had some serious competition on their hands. We think it safe to say that for the first time in a long time NVIDIA is back in the enthusiast game, and in one fell swoop the 790i Ultra has been able to gobble up nearly every performance lead the X48 held and then some. This gives us hope for competition at the high-end for motherboards based on something other than the Intel X38 and X48.</p> <p>One could argue up until the 790i release that the ability to run SLI - the technology that allows multi-GPU 3D graphics acceleration using two or more NVIDIA video cards installed in a single system - was the one and only reason for purchasing an NVIDIA-based motherboard. Earlier offerings based on NVIDIA chipsets, like the 680i and the 780i that followed, were expensive, ran hotter, consumed more power, and were generally considered second-rate choices when it came to overclocking Intel CPUs, especially the quad-cores. The boards that did make it to retail certainly experienced their fair share of problems - users either loved them or hated them, there was no middle ground. Fierce brand loyalties often had more to do with purchasing decisions than anything else did.</p> <p><span class="content">From what we have seen, 790i has the ability to change all of this in the high-end market. The decision to design around DDR3 technology breathes new life into NVIDIA's once-aging product line, and the move to incorporate a native, on-die PCI Express 2.0 bus controller within the 790i SPP has added an attraction that 780i simply could not provide. CPU overclocking is also much improved with 790i claiming full compatibility right out of the box with Intel's newest 45nm processors, including official FSB 1600 support for desktop processors like the Core 2 Extreme QX9770. Regarding just how overclockable the chipset proved to be - we will let our results speak for themselves.</span></p> <p><span class="content"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3283">Read more...</a><br /> </span></p> </span></font></div>

<font size="2">O analiza a placilor cu chipseturi Amd 780G, Nvidia 790i si a placii de baza Gigabyte 680i.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3279">Read more</a></font>

As SLI is only available on NVIDIA chipsets, users who are inclined to adopt multi-GPU systems are always intrigued to find out just what they can expect from NVIDIA's chipset when it's teamed up with a couple of their midrange or top-end graphics cards. (There's also Intel's Skulltrail platform and mobile offerings, of course, which add nForce 100 bridge chips to get around the NVIDIA chipset requirement.) Over the next week, we're going to pit EVGA's reference design 780i motherboard against the custom design ASUS ROG board known as the Striker II Formula to see which is the better overall solution, or do they each perform well in certain usage scenarios? That's what we'll find out.

Things are certainly becoming interesting within the multi-GPU market, even with SLI licensing restrictions in place. There is something of a challenge to multi-GPU capable motherboard solutions, as both ATI and NVIDIA have dual-GPU graphics cards available now. This will provide users with flexibility of choice, allowing the use of virtually any current PCI-E motherboard/chipset whilst still enjoying a single card variant of SLI or CrossFire.

Much of the success of the dual-GPU cards rests upon comparative pricing and driver integration, just as it does with dual-card or even triple-card SLI. Our testing over the past few months has shown that there is definitely room for improvement when using any form of dual- or multi-GPU rendering in today's games. Having said that, even if we take driver level optimizations and multi-GPU frame rate gains into consideration, the demand for multi-GPU solutions is still apparent, further bolstered by games like Crysis, thus creating an avid interest in SLI capable platform

If NVIDIA has managed to get the 780i chipset "right", it may well offer users a viable alternative to Intel's own DDR2 chipset solutions. That's quite a mammoth task, especially since NVIDIA continues to use a chipset bus architecture that allows for either synchronous or asynchronous overclocking of the processor and memory.

Naturally, users of the older NVIDIA 680i based motherboards have aired concerns of issues pertaining to Front Side Bus and Memory Bus related "holes". They would also like to know just how stable the new NVIDIA boards are when overclocked using quad-core processors. NVIDIA has been working to improve these aspects on their 780i product, and we aim to put this to the test today.

Overall system performance is often marred by the additional chipset latency offset required to run the memory bus and FSB asynchronously. As with Intel chipsets, there are rules that determine just how tRD, memory dividers, and memory CAS (Column Address Strobe) must align to assure that the data transfer between the memory bus and FSB can take place. Users who wish to delve deeper into the technicalities and mathematics of tRD and CAS are encouraged to read this article. Although we are dealing with a different topology here, the concept of data transfer and timing is essentially the same, though additional delays and rules apply when both buses are out of sync with each other.

As there are so many similarities between the 680i and 780i, we'd expect and hope that some of the experience gained over the past 18 months by both NVIDIA and ASUS using the 680i chipset will carry through to the 780i motherboards. Moreover, what does opting for the custom solution from ASUS get you for the extra expenditure over the reference design? Let's take a first look at the ASUS Striker II Formula.

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Let’s check out the PCB layout, BIOS features and overclocking potential of the new mainboard on Intel X48 Express chipset. In this article we are also going to investigate in detail such phenomenon as CPU degradation.

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<p align="justify" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;"><span style="font-size: 24pt; line-height: 115%;"><font size="2" face="Verdana">Din nou, suntem primii care pun m&acirc;na pe un produs. <img src="/FCKeditor/editor/images/smiley/msn/wink_smile.gif" alt="" /><br /> O implementare&nbsp;a noului chipset 780G de la AMD ATi, semnată BiOSTAR, cu bunele şi relele acestuia... şi o sumedenie de benchmark-uri şi testări.</font></span></p>

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<font size="2">Today we are going to introduce to you a very interesting combo solution from MSI that is based on Intel P35 Express chipset and can work with DDR3 or DDR2 SDRAM. Find out what the pros and cons of this approach are from our detailed review.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/msi-p35-platinum-combo.html">Read more...</a></font>