Logic would dictate that DFI’s use of three PCI-Express devices would leave only a total of three of the X48 chipset’s six available PCI-Express lanes available to the X48-T2R’s x1 and third x16 PCI-Express slots. Thus, if all onboard devices and slots are used, the third x16 slot must drop to x1 or x2 transfer mode, which is hardly worthy of any graphics card.
DFI’s rear-panel port section features a huge hole for VRM cooling, in keeping with the Lanparty brand’s overclocking theme. Only the basic connectors are featured here, and the boards added internal SATA ports seem geared for cases that have front-panel eSATA connections.
The Lanparty LT X48-T2R gets its Ultra ATA and two of its SATA ports from JMicron’s popular JMB363 controller. This device uses a PCI-Express x1 connection for data transfers up to 250MB/s in each direction.
A Marvell 88E8053 controller serves one Gigabit Ethernet connection over its PCI-Express interface.
Meanwhile, an 88E8052 provides the second Gigabit Ethernet connection, again through PCI-Express. Notice that DFI also offers jumpers for hardware overclocking, which is an option we hadn’t seen in a while.
The VT6307 FireWire controller adds two IEEE-1394 ports via legacy PCI connection.
The Lanparty LT X48-T2R’s “onboard” audio comes by way of a riser card, which is supposed to reduce noise compared to typical onboard codec locations.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
The Bernstein audio module uses Realtek’s ALC885 codec to modulate HD signals from the ICH9R Southbridge. It features separate 7.1-channel rear and two-channel front outputs for audio multitasking, such as running a VoIP application over a headset while playing a movie soundtrack through speakers.
I thought the major concern with overclocking was doing it with 4 GB or 8 GB of memory installed and with quad cores.
Buying an overly expensive high end motherboard but installing a 65 nm dual core processor and just 2 GB of RAM seems a very odd combination to me.
Not so odd if you want to get the base foundation set up and then wait for lower prices on higher performance parts later on down the road.
A quad core (3.0 GHz x 4) chip is coming down the pike by years end and DDR3 prices are on the slide. Building an E8400 / 2 GB base machine is exactly what I did to finally migrate from my 5 year old P4 Extreme Edition / Intel 875 based rig.
The ECS offering has supposedly been out for around a month, but I can't find it for sale ANYWHERE!! can't even find a price. I used to turn my nose up at ECS products. Our company used Asus boards exclusively thinking they were a higher quality product. Evey one of our Asus boards failed within 4 years. This may be because the Chinese have studied the American business model... Make a product that is designed to either fail or need parts within a calculated period of time. ECS are much cheaper, and so far seem more stable than the Maximus Formula board we purchased recently. The Asus BIOS is for people who like to toy with settings. Unfortunately their BIOS has become complicated beyond their programmers ability too write stable code.
Arcolyte - lol. Did you fall asleep and dream up another page of the review which had power consumption whilst overclocking? :p
For the record I'm using my first Gigabyte board (X38-DQ6) and overall I'm pretty happy with it, but having said that I haven't used Asus in at least 5 years. With these comparisons it often comes down to features since performance is pretty near (although the low memory speeds achieved by the Gigabyte surprised me!).
" Intel covers all of its CPU VRM MOSFET?s with sinks. Our apologies for the alphabet soup that made up the last comment. " -> You could've gone with " Central Processing Unit Voltage Regulator Module Metal?Oxide?Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor's " , so it's ok =)
asrock rocks....lol...although i'll keep my gigabyte... as i dont know where to say this, it's better say it here... your main page is eating my cpu cycles... between 25% up to 50% cpu utilization while viewing your site? please cut down in animated ads... running a c2d at 3.6 and still lags while surfing... dah... it's just your site... os is it me? i think it's the ad on the top right corner that is causing that...
