The Intel DX38BT Motherboard is based on the Intel X38 Express chipset and designed to support the most cutting edge processors, and sports an impressive range of high performance features.

The latest stuff is never cheap, and this motherboard is no exception, but it does give all you need to take advantage of new technologies. With support for DDR3, Quad-core and Extreme edition Intel processors and eSATA, it’s features allow the use of the latest products.

The striking black gives the Intel DX38BT some good looks, fitting right in a gaming system box with a view of the inside. The LGA775 CPU socket is still there, but the rest of the board is the interesting part. Here are some of the features:

• Intel Core2 Extreme, Quad and Duo support
• 1333/1066/800 MHz FSB
• No integrated graphics
• Up to 8 GB of dual-channel DDR3 DIMMs (4 x 2 GB)
• HD audio
• Gigabit Ethernet support
• Up to 12 USB 2.0 ports
• Three PCIe x16
• Two firewire
• Six SATA ports with RAID

Even though this board is aimed at gamers, and by offering three PCIe x16 ports, it certainly caters to them, but the rest of the features offer almost everything you could need to start a computer.

There is plenty of room for memory expansion, up to 8 GB, which is great for new games, but is also more than enough for any office application you’d like to throw at it. Up to four sticks are supported, but I hardly imagine that anything over a total of 4 GB would be necessary.

HD audio, although common to many boards, is always a good extra, and with the quality offered, along with 7.1 channel audio and the ability to listen to two separate audio channels you’ll be able to listen to music and chat to your friends online at the same time.

Gigabit Ethernet has not yet taken complete hold, but in looking forward it will certainly give a good amount of future-proofness, and allow very high speeds over networks that support it.

Storage is handled by IDE and SATA. The standard two IDE ports are there, holding up the fort from times gone by, although I suspect they will be on their way out sometime soon, much like the ubiquitous serial ports and parallel port that are missing from this motherboard. The eSATA ports are certainly more useful than serial and parallel ports, which continue to be useful only in industry where dedicated machines have been running on them for decades. Six SATA ports with RAID will allow a combination of striped storage or mirrored storage, according to your needs.

I love motherboards with lots of features and my only gripe with this one is the lack of onboard graphics. That said, I’d just invest in a cheap one considering all the features of the board itself. Although quite expensive, you get more than you need for any application, it has all the necessary features and more. I would recommend it for anyone considering the jump into the Core2 range.

The AM2 chipset which will be utilized by new AMD chips has seen quite a boost in popularity with at least a few motherboard manufacturers getting in on the action and making motherboards to suit. As for chipsets, well nVidia is still the maker of choice, being a close supporter of AMD.

The AM2 socket has 940 pins, but should not be confused with the 940 pin chips that AMD had a little while back, these have a different setup for the pins under the processor itself.

Besides the obvious support of AM2 processors, this board has quiet a few other features. It can suppot up to 8GB or DDR2 RAM. There are 2 PCIe slots, but they only work at 8x, meaning they are slightly slower than cards running on the more expensive chipset. The usual floppy drive connectors and hard drive connectors are in place, but there are also two sets of 3 SATA connectors.

High Definition Audio is the new standard in onboard audio and allows for much better quality from sound cards that are built into the motherboard.

In the full test at motherboards.org, they found the board to be a little slower that the ASUS board that they had for comparisson. The board itself is aimed at the mid-range. The nForce 570 SLI chipset is not as high-performance as its 590 counterpart, which is aimed at the enthusiast.

Check out the full article here.

Motherboards are not only for desktop computers and its easy to forget that there is also a huge market for motherboards in areas such as servers.
Motherboards for servers have a much differet focus that those used for desktop computers. The very nature of servers means that they are meeting the needs of many users at the same time, and so need to be designed differently.

More than one processor is very common in order to handle the number of processes created by being accessed by many users at the same time. A large amount of memory is also needed to handle this. Servers have often had more memory than most desktop computers. They also need to be secure, so use of things such as ECC memory help to ensure that nothing gets lost while it is in the computer.

Massive storage space is also common and this motherboard comes with 6 SATA2 slots, allowing for a lrage configuration of drives into an array, with RAID 0, 5 and 10 being supported. There is integrated audio, 4 USB ports and a LAN port for your convenience.

Two Intel LGA771 sockets allow the use of two Intel Xeon Dempsey/Woodcrest processors.

From the Tyan website:

High-end workstation performance comes to the entry-level market with the introduction of the Tempest i5000XL (S2692). Using Intel’s 5000X chipset, the Tempest i5000XL delivers support for (2) Intel® Xeon® 5000 and 5100 sequence processors; FBDIMM support; dual PCI Express x16 slots for SLI capability, as well as multiple PCI slots; built-in Audio, SATA2 with RAID, and onboard dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, all in an SSI CEB (12″ x 10.5″) compact form factor for mid to full-size tower configurations.

Although it may be entry-level it is still expensive compared to even the coolest of desktop motherboards, but you do get a helluva lot. It has SLI support if you need hardcore graphics and practically everything else you could need from a motherboard.

Check out the full preview at Phoronix

Hardwarezone takes a sneak peak at the 2 motherboards for the new socket AM2 from AMD. These boards are not in production yet, but give a glance at what to expect.

The AM2 will be compatible with current AMD chipsets because of the hypertransport technology remaining the same. The 940 pin chips will not be compatible with the older 940 pin layout that was used before.

The AM2 chips will include integrated DDR2 controllers, allowing them to use DDR2, rather than the older DDR, which they were stuck with using for such a long time.

Despite the compatibility with older chipsets, Nvidia have released the new 500-series chipsets to compliment the release of these new chips.

Both of these fully-features boards make good platforms on which to build a new computer based on the new AMD chips. Check them out to see how they look.

LINK

Biostar are attempting to get into the enthusiast overclocking part of the computer sector with this new model. The T-series represents their high-perfromance boards.

In the review at bit-tech.net they have a closer look at how well it performs, especially compared to the other boards in the same price range as this one.

The board itself is well set out with the 24 pin power cable input being the strangest positioned thing on this board. Sitting back near the USB ports it makes wiring a bit of a drag as the wires have to pass across the board from the back of the PSU.

One of the other strange things was the lack of a manual in the box, which was a little strange, although it was probably just forgotten on this box, as I don’t think there is any great reason to not have one. The cost saving could only be minor by leaving it out.

There is an option to set the voltage of the DDR2 modules to 3.3V, which is actually too much for them. With standard voltages of 1.8V this should fry them within a few hours.

Much of the board is set out alright, not too well, but not too badly either. The features it includes are good. A 280MHz FSB speed was all that they could get out of the board which doesn’t rate that great against some of the competition that can be overclocked to much higher levels than that.

For gaming enthusiasts it will not meet the grade. It does well generally, but not enough for those who want to dish out all this cash for a motherboard. Check out the full review at bit-tech.net

LINK

The Abit AN8-32X nForce4 SLI motherboard is reviewed at PCstats. Crossfire is not a great as it could be, so boards with the nForce4 SLI chipset are about the only choice for enthusiasts.

Abit is well known in the industry and builds respectible motherboards. A recent merger helped out the company amidst financial difficulties.

The board itself has a socket 939 connection to support all of AMDs chips. It also comes with a 7.1 audio built in, which is a decent extra. 4 Gigs of memory, gigabit LAN and SATA2 are amongst the other things in the package.

It’s priced fairly well for a board that has quite a lot on offer.

Overclocking ability was determined to be 280MHz, which is not bad, but not as good as some other models on the market.

Overall it manages to impress in the benchmarks. Again, it does not perform to an exceptionally high standard but is in the top half of the pack.

Head on over to PCstats to check it out.

LINK

This motherboard from Asus comes ready for ATI’s crossfire. As a board in general ASUS has done a fantastic job at making a board that is very overclockable with very little adjustment of voltages and other settings. Attention to quality is clear in the ability to overclock easily and making it ready to do so.

As reported at bit-tech, this board has a pretty good layout and performs well in most of the tests performed on it. Although 3DMark05 dropped to the desktop after about 17 hours or so, the 1380MHz hypertransport speed attained is the highest ever seen by the guys over at bit-tech.

One of the only niggles they had was that the headers for the Silicon Image 3132 SATA controller were located at the back of the board by the I/O panel.

Overall, whatever options you may be looking for in a motherboard, for example whether to go for SLI or Crossfire or which kind of chipset you should go for, this board takes the cake for overclocking.

If overclocking is your game then this board is a vital part of your arsenal.

LINK

Asus P4P800E Deluxe is a more feature rich model of its younger brother. If you don’t find the offerings of the plain P4P800 enough for your taste then this one will be pretty sure to do it for you. Being from the same basic form as its sibling, it offers a whole bunch of extras to cater for diverse motherboard needs.

The Asus P4P800E Deluxe motherboard comes with advanced and integrated Intel 865PE chipset, and supports features like Intel Prescott CPU with up to 4GB system memory, 800FSB, dual-channel DDR400 and Intel’s revolutionary Hyper-Threading Technology, offering completely enhanced productivity especially when multi-tasking is done.

Major features of the Asus P4P800E Deluxe motherboard:

• IEEE 1394 connectivity
• Multi-RAID technology
• POST Reporter
• 8-channel audio
• Serial ATA
• WiFi Slots
• Intel 865PE Northbridge Chipset
• Intel 82801ER Southbridge Chipset
• Super-speedy USB 2.0
• Gigabit LAN
• FDD Header
• AGP Slots
• PCI Slots

There are various Bios settings allowing those who like to delve into overclocking to have a go and see how far their equipment can go. With the number of options available there will be little lacking.

With all of these features you really don’t need to dish out big bucks for board that can often cost up to 200 bucks with all of these features. For its price range it is extremely well featured. The P4P800E Deluxe motherboard provides 4 DIMM sockets using 184-pin DDR with a total capacity of up to 4GB. It has one 8X AGP slot with new generation VGA interface platform that delivers enhanced graphics performance with high bandwidth speeds.

Users can enjoy clear and realistic graphics for providing excellent gaming and movie watching experience. The P4P800E Deluxe motherboard supports Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron Processors with a FSB frequency of 400, 533 and 800 MHz.

The P4P800E Deluxe LAN chip provides a back panel LAN port. The Ethernet 10/100Mbps LAN Network Connection provides high-quality 10/100 Ethernet performance for high-value users who need straightforward network connectivity. The audio system, based on AD1980 SoundMAX chip, has 6 channels allowing immersive sound experience if you happen to have enough speakers.

Pros

• Reasonable price and high performance
• Easy and safe overclocking
• Easy and fast installation
• Dual BIOS
• Extremely full featured low-cost model

The powerful Asus P4P800 motherboard has brought a revolution in the world of technology. The model features several hi-tech factors like Intel 865PE chipset to support 3.2 GHz+ P4 CPU on 800MHz FSB, Dual DDR 400 memory, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology, and a full range of other advanced features which deliver high-performance solutions and full value support to any task.

The Asus P4P800 motherboard provides advanced and integrated Intel Extreme graphics 2. So combined with AGP 8X graphics, Serial ATA technology, S/PDIF out interface and USB 2.0 for easy connectivity, this motherboard is one most high performance motherboards in this price range, with features that would easily only be found on much more expensive equipment.

Here is a list of the major features of the Asus P4P800 motherboard:

• Socket 478 Connector
• Back Panel Connector
• DDR DIMM Memory Slots
• FDD Header
• Intel 865G GMCH Northbridge Chipset
• Intel 82801EB Southbridge Chipset
• USB 2.0 Headers
• AGP Slots
• PCI Slots

With its host of featues you might expect to pay more for what you get. Its top class features certainly make it a competitor in the higher price ranges. The Zero Insertion Force [ZIF] style Socket 478 is easy to install and helps to upgrade the processor. The P4P800 motherboard supports Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron Processors with a FSB frequency of 400, 533 and 800 MHz.

The Asus P4P800 provides 4 DIMM slots using 184-pin DDR with a total capacity of up to 4GB. The motherboard has one 8X AGP slot with new generation VGA interface platform that delivers enhanced graphics performance with high bandwidth speeds. This allows you to enjoy clear and realistic graphics that provide excellent gaming and movie watching.

The Ethernet 10/100Mbps LAN Network Connection provides high-quality 10/100 Ethernet performance for high-end users who need straightforward network connectivity. Pity it doesn’t come with 1000Mbps, which would have been a cool extra. The audio system, based on a AD1980 SoundMAX chip, supports high quality 6-channels, allowing immersive 3D sound.

Pros

• Stable, easy to use layout
• Reasonable price and high-quality performance
• Dual BIOS
• Easy and safe overclocking
• Cost-effective model with many features
• Easy and fast installation

Cons

• No firewire and no USB brackets

Asus P5P800 is a very powerful motherboard that can energize even the most innovative PCs and can boast the all round performance of any normal computer system. This model offers nearly all the latest features in sockets, chipsets, slots, ports and pins. If you want to experience the speed of LGA775 CPU yet worried about the price, Asus P5P800 can be your solution.

The Asus P5P800 motherboard with its myriad of innovative technologies like Asus Hyper Path technology, AI NOS, Sound Blaster Upgrades, AL Net2, Dual-Channel DDR400 and Al Audio offers good stability and incredible performance to any computer.

Here is a listing of the main features:

• Socket 775
• Intel 865PE chipset
• Four 184-pin DDR SDRAM memory slots
• 8X/4X AGP slot
• Support up to four UltraDMA 100/66/33 devices
• A Gigabit LAN chip and a back panel LAN port
• AC ’97 Sound CODEC

The Asus P5P800 motherboard stops you from paying double for other world-class featured boards. The Zero Insertion Force [ZIF] socket allows easy processor installation, and also helps in upgrading the processor. The Intel 865PE Northbridge chipset and Intel ICH5 Southbridge chipset support the Intel Pentium 4/Celeron processors with FSB frequency of 533 or 800 MHz.

The P5P800 IDE controller can support up to four UltraDMA 133 devices and the AC ’97 Sound CODEC [Realtek] can support high quality 6 channel audio systems. The integrated 6-channel audio is a great benefit because you don’t have to invest in a seperate sound card. Plus the sound is not bad.

The Asus P5P800 also supports SATA. This specification allows spaces for more slender and flexible cables with lower pin counts, reduced voltage requirements and up to 150 MB/s data transfer rates. It doesn’t, however, have SATA2, which doubles that throughput.

The Gigabit LAN chip provides a back panel LAN port. The Ethernet 1000Mbps LAN Network Connections provide the highest quality Ethernet performance for speed users who need direct network connectivity. Pretty much a standard feature to get LAN capability, but the 1000Mbps keeps you up to speed so you can enjoy the fastest possible speed, if they are available.

The AGP 4x/8x is a mixed blessing. Although not up to the higher speeds of PCIe, it does allow you to use any of those older cards that you have lying around, or that you are possibly still using.

Overall the motherboard can add some oomph to an older system. With the newer socket you might have to upgrade your old processor, but you can at least salvage those cool graphics cards.