Yet another chipset from Intel who evidently appear to be somewhat dissatisfied with the 10 or so chipsets they’ve released in the past year. The P45 is basically a cut-down, lower-priced version of the high-end X48 chipset-based boards. It’s also set to be the last socket-775 chipset until the release of the eagerly awaited Nehalem range at the end of the year.So what makes the P45 better than its predecessor, the P35? Firstly, the P45 ups the front side bus to a maximum of 1,600Mhz over the P35’s 1,333MHz, which in turn gives overclockers a little more headroom to play with. It also boasts PCI-Express 2.0 support for twice the graphics bandwidth and supports Intel’s 45nm-based processors, the latest, more efficient and slightly more powerful Core 2 chips. It features the ICHlO southbridge too, which includes a 10GB ethernet controller and built-in wireless support, while dropping the aging PS/2 and LPT ports.Asus has a reputation as one of the more innovative companies in the market – the Eee being a testament to that – and this latest PSQ Deluxe is no exception. The board itself is well laid-out, with the usual, aesthetically
In the northern hemisphere, spring is always the time for new things: lambs, leaves and Larrabee chipsets. Yes, it’s the Intel Developers Forum in Beijing again, where Intel shows off its latest kit to the other manufacturers.Pride of place was given to the Nehalem chipset, which features up to eight cores and uses simultaneous multi-threading across up to four cores. Intel showed a 25 per cent increase in performance over Penryn processors, and up to a 33 per cent reduction in power usage.Also demonstrated was a Nehalem-powered game engine, featuring a meteor strike and flames spreading realistically through a village, with graphics, physics and animal Al being handled by different parts of the processor. Intel’s Ron Fosner said that multi-core chips could take over from discrete graphics cards, and are capable of providing a gaming experience reserved for top-end graphics cards. The Nehalem is expected in early 2009.Still in its infancy, the Larrabee graphics processing unit marks Intel’s re-entry into the graphics cards. It features a 16 to 24 core chipset, capable of processing different instructions for ray-tracing or physics effects. Intel also showed off its Tukwila and Dunnington processors. Details on
Funny how things change. It used to be AMD versus Intel, and ATI versus NVIDIA. But now it’s Intel versus NVIDIA, as the two monolithic chipset companies tread further and further into each other’s territory, and AMD and ATI take a back seat for the time being. It almost seems as if as soon as something is announced by Intel, NVIDIA announces its own version of that something. Mobile processors are obviously going to become big business in the next few years, thanks to the success of Asus’s Eee PC and its army of clones.Intel announced their low-power, high performance Atom chipset specifically for this market, and were closely followed by NVIDIA announcing the Tegra chipset. NVIDIA’s chipset claims to be more powerful and draw less power, but the Atom is debuting in MSI’s Wind notebook, whereas the Tegra, based on NVIDIA’s APX2500 processor, has yet to be released.Then Intel snapped up raytracing guru, Daniel Pohl, and NVIDIA acquired Rayscale shortly afterwards. Conceived by a team of scientists from the University of Utah, Rayscale specialize in ray-traced graphics not dissimilar to Pohl’s projects.Stiff CompetitionUnlike Intel, NVIDIA is taking a more cautious approach
The passage of time rapidly turns most PC components from nubile young things into withered old crones. It’s just the way of the world. But not this Asus board. It’s arguably even more of a goer than it was at launch. It’s enough to make you wonder whether there’s a portrait of a dusty and desiccated P5K3 hidden in the attic.The reason for the P5K3’s Dorian Gray status, of course, is that Intel’s P35 chipset has yet to be eclipsed for pure overclocking. Meanwhile it just gets cheaper. In our tests, it achieved a startling 520MHz bus frequency without northbridge voltage tweaking. It’s a great choice for making the most of cheap Intel processors with annoyingly low (and locked) CPU multipliers. Its no-nonsense feature set adds to the built-for-speed allure.MSI P35 PlatinumThe Intel P35 chipset’s status as the weapon of choice for overclocking slaps on it perilously lofty expectations. It’s easy to forget that it’s a mainstream chipset. The same logic applies to MSI’s P35 Platinum board.This is a sub $200 motherboard that nevertheless packs quite a solid feature set, including support for the latest 1,333MHz Intel processors and quality copper cooling
We never expect too much from an Intel ‘G’ chipset, after all it has onboard graphics and is not really designed to match its bigger brother the ‘R’. So we were not surprised to see the ECS G45T-M2 fail to perform exceptionally well.To be fair to motherboards our policy is to use the most powerful processor we have in the office, in this case it was the Intel QX9770, a processor that would normally not grace the likes of a low end motherboard but never-the-less that was the setup. It failed to boot; it just simply did not post at all. We tried every combination of components until we changed the QX9770 for an old E6300. Only with this rather antiquated processor did the system boot. Shocking to say the least. We ran our benchmarks twice, one with the onboard GPU and the other with a HD 4870.The first set of results was pitiful, a 3DMark06 score of 984 and a PCMark05 score of 4622. The second set of results looked a lot more satisfying with a 3DMark06 score of 8783 and a PCMark05 score of 6328. We can say without a