Eight P35-DDR2 Motherboards Compared

Test Setup, Continued

Getting the most from a system requires good RAM, and all the boards in this review support memory up to DDR2-1066, even though the specification hasn't been approved by Intel. Keeping the boards stable at this memory speed is Corsair's XMS2-8888.

Limited-performance CrossFire support via one x16 and one x4 slot is less than ideal for benchmarking, but we've heard few complaints concerning Nvidia 8800GTX performance. Foxconn sent its part for these single-card tests.

Hard drives may be the slowest part of modern systems, but Western Digital's 150 GB Raptor gives a nice little improvement to program load times.