Published on Sunday, June 6, 2010 by admin ASRock's current X58 line-up consist of the SuperComputer ($275), Deluxe3 ($225), Deluxe, and the Extreme3's predecessor, the Extreme. The Extreme3 is available today for $190.  Other products in this price range that the Extreme3 is competing with are the Gigabyte EX58-UD3R at $189, the MSI Pro-E for $190, the MSI Pro-E USB3 for $200, and the Foxconn Flami...

Published on Monday, May 24, 2010 by admin In the race to get a USB3 capable mini-ITX motherboard to market, Gigabyte has today announced the first entry into the arena - the GA-H55N-USB3. Measuring a tiny 17cm x 17cm, this board is a stark contrast the the Gigabyte X58A-UD9 released last week. [ad#300x250_image_ads] USB3 connectivity is achieved via the onboard NEC uPD720200 host controller to two USB3...

Published on Saturday, May 15, 2010 by admin Gigabyte are currently attacking the X58 market; with no less than 10 boards, from the budget EX58-UD3R (and it's upgrade, the X58A-UD3R) to the premium EX58-EXTREME, their latest board tacks on the moniker of the X58A-UD9. In terms of board features, you get support for 6-core Gulftown processors, 4 way SLI and Crossfire X across 7 PCI-E 2.0 slots using 2 NF200 ch...

Published on Monday, May 10, 2010 by admin Announcing high end products and 'Halo' type hardware is relatively easy for manufacturers - slap some snazzy artwork next to a few pictures, wring a few industry related endorsements, put the major selling points in big letters, write a website page for it, and maybe run a competition to let a couple of people win one.    For entry level boards, it's a different ma...

Published on Saturday, May 8, 2010 by admin So far we’ve looked at three different mini-ITX motherboards here at Anandtech over the past 6 months. While each of the products we’ve reviewed have ticked a certain number of boxes, when you look at the feature sets of similarly priced m-ATX boards one of the irksome common denominators (among other things) with the mini-ITX offerings is that you essentiall...

Published on Wednesday, May 5, 2010 by admin The March 2010 launch of Intel's hexa-core Core i7-980X gave us a good reason to revisit the LGA 1366 interface. Today, we're looking at four new X58 Express-based motherboards that tie USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s support in to Intel's flagship platform. Many people assume newer is better, but that’s not always true when it comes to processor interfaces. The high-...

Published on Tuesday, May 4, 2010 by admin Okay, I lied a little. Biostar announce their new tech as ‘BIO-unlocKING’, a feature on their latest 8xx series motherboard to unlock the quad core Thuban based processors (such as the Phenom II X4 960T) to their hexacore variants. Biostar cover themselves by noting that not all quad core Thubans will unlock. This feature will also help with unlockable dual c...

Published on Sunday, May 2, 2010 by admin Popular motherboard manufacturer MSI has announced the next weapon in their motherboard arsenal - the MSI Big Bang-XPower. Like other second generation X58 motherboards, the XPower will feature SATA 6G and USB 3.0 teamed up with a slew of overclocking features in order to captivate the enthusiast market. MSI are keen to promote their new 16-phase CPU VRM and libe...

Published on Saturday, May 1, 2010 by admin Uncharacteristically late for ASUS, the P55 based Maximus III Extreme was rolled out to retail a couple of weeks ago. ASUS’s  M3E  follows in the footsteps of boards from EVGA and MSI, by teaming up nVidia’s NF200 chipset to multiplex sixteen native PCIe lanes out to provide additional front-end bandwidth for multiple graphics cards and other devices. Overa...