X48 Motherboard Comparison, Part 2
Still on top, but for how long?
With all the commotion concerning Intel’s upcoming “mainstream” chipset, it’s easy to forget that the X48 Express continues to be the company’s top pick. With full support for PCI-Express 2.0 graphics, the X48 already has the most significant “new technology” trumpeted for its “next release.” But the future look even brighter for today’s high-end buyers, as the X48 offers twice the number of PCI-Express 2.0 lanes as the upcoming mainstream part. Furthermore, product maturity assures that builders can expect fewer bugs with the current range of X48 boards than they would from the initial release of next-generation parts.
The X48 Express has been around for a few months and even longer if we include the previous X38 incarnation, but that isn’t keeping manufacturers from updating their product lines. Several companies are now producing updated revisions of previously released models, while a few took extra time to “perfect” their product. Today’s new models come from both expected and unexpected high-end motherboard manufacturers, including ASRock, DFI, ECS and Intel itself.
We’ve already covered the basic features of the X48 Express in our first X48 Motherboard Comparison, so let’s see what makes the new models different.
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nihility I thought the major concern with overclocking was doing it with 4 GB or 8 GB of memory installed and with quad cores.Reply
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. -
@niReply
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.
That's the beauty of the X48 platform; longevity. -
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.Reply
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Glad to see that gigabyte's board was so much more energy efficient than Asus', or any other board for that matter... especially while overclockingReply
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Fedor Arcolyte - lol. Did you fall asleep and dream up another page of the review which had power consumption whilst overclocking? :pReply
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 =)Reply
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frodbonzi I wonder how the Asus' Rampage Formula stacks up here? It supports DDR2 or DDR3 and is part of the RoG line... X48 as well...Reply -
xanxaz 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...Reply -
wozeus I see that Newegg has ECS X48T-A for under $200. Looks like it's a great deal...going to get one.Reply