The notorious roller coaster.

"The former MSI P35 Platinum Revision 1.0 won the performance portion of our earlier P35 DDR2 shootout, but by too small an amount to offset its staggering defeat in overclocking. Today's P35 Platinum Revision 1.1 maintains all of the original board's performance but with huge gains in overclocking [...]"

Those gains place now the board above the desired 450Mhz FSB, making it an option for overclockers. MSI wants to shift this motherboard into the mid-priced market, wich explains the loss of two separate channels for headset use while other audio files play through the speakers.

After the relative success Gigabyte had with it's "D" line of P965 based mainboards, they are back with a the new Ultra Durable 2 series. What's new is the fact you will only find solid-state capacitors this time. If that wasn't good enough, they have also improved the CPU's voltage regulator circuitry, which means it will use less power (longer lifetime, lower temperatures).

Among the mobos in this line, one that's getting quite a bit of attention is their DDR2 AND DDR3 compatible P35C-DS3R. Previous attempts to give users this flexibility of RAM options (MSI) resulted in not very competitive products. This one is a different beast, performing with any kind of memory you choose. There are several reviews for you to enjoy: Hardware Logic, CPU3D, Hardware Zone, Techgage and X-bit labs.

Overclocking capabilities vary, but this board is capable (on average) of hitting 500 Mhz. Not bad at all for a P35 based motherboard.

Buying a CPU has been rather simple for a year now: you can either buy Intel or wait to see what Phenom is about. When it comes to place a motherboard under that processor, things are much different.

At the begining, there was only the 975X, but soon the P965, the 680i SLI and (some time later) the RD600 were there too. You can find no other board than DFI's LANPARTY UT ICFX3200 based on the ATI chipset, but it adds to the "problem". And don't forget about VIA's PT880, a quite cheap solution, specially when on an AsRock mainboard. Other options include Intel's new P35, old 945 and older 865 (!). You get the catch, don't you?

Fortunately for those who think "enough is enough", SiS introduction to the Core 2 market couldn't be better (worse). Hardware Secrets has taken a look at the reference board and their conclusions are so demolishing that I will leave it up to you to decide if it's even worthy to click and see how bad it is.

The upgrade path for owners of an Asus motherboard has just been made clear: stay with your board.

A recent concern for Core 2 users was wether swapping their CPU for a new Penryn based one, later this year, would mean having to expend more money on a new motherboard. Asus has proven to be a safe haven in this case, because they just published a list of "old" mainboards that will support Yorkfield and Wolfdale processors. These boards range form the recently released P35 based ones to the previous generation chipsets P965 and 975X. Some nForce680i SLI mainboards are also included.

All of this is good news, given the fact that P35 boards only improve performance by 5% approximately and X38 chipset may raise the bar higher, but at the cost of decreasing efficiency (more power consumption). Those of us who have one of the first wave of motherboards that offered Core 2 support, get a (somewhat) unexpected gift: upgrade options until 2008 and beyond.

Among the boards in the list, I would mention the P5B Deluxe, which was of the very first Conroe adopters and an overclocking champion that still shines brightly. Thanks to it's reasonable price, is a top seller and it will be the heart of high end systems for quite some time yet.

In the days of the socket 939, it was a known fact that the setting "Command Rate" made a big difference for the memory. Then came the Core 2 and this setting just disappeared from the scene, until shortly after the processor's release. Enter nVidia and their 680 chipset. There you had the Command Rate again, was it the reason why it performed a little bit better under games? There was no way to find out.

Now that the P35 chipset has been launched, there's finally the possibility to change that setting in the BIOS and xbitlabs has not wasted the opportunity. The tests they conducted showed that by setting Command Rate to 1T, performance increased slightly (by 0.5% at most). So, on an Intel platform, this setting is not a useful one. More obscure ones, like Transaction Booster, help more in increasing the system's performance (just 1%, in this case), although it actually works only with low memory frequency settings. But even limited as it is, it's better than Command Rate.

Besides the influence of Command rate and Transaction Booster they checked if there was a performance drop when Asus P5K Deluxe changed Strap as the FSB frequency scaled. And it appears that it's not affected like Asus mainboards based on the P965 chipset. All in all, quite a different beast.

This won't be of much interest to enthusiasts and overclockers, but there are all kind of buyers and budgets. The ECS P35T-A (reviewed at Legion Hardware) has the required settings available in the BIOS to achieve a decent overclock but, lacking a proper cooling system and adequate power regulation (it only incorporates a 4-phase power design), they are worth zero.

In case you aren't interested in overclocking, this could be your board. Performance is good and it doesn't show compatibility or stability issues. The audio and network solutions work. It has an eSATA port, four DDR2 DIMM slots, three PCI slots, a single PCI x1 slot, two PCI x16 slots, an IDE port and six SATA ports.

The ECS P35T-A (Rev 1.0) is just a cheap motherboard that happens to feature the P35 chipset. How cheap? you may ask. Knowing ECS, I would venture a retail price below 100$. That could prove to be the foundation of a really cheap system. Add an 800 Mhz FSB Core 2 and you have both OC potential and an upgrade path.

DDR3 may be the new kid on the block, but if you don't want to spend too much on memory, and yet, buy a new system today (or in the near future), what options do you have? You most likely will want a motherboard that supports upcoming processors, or a P35 based one, to frase it differently. You want to use that "old" DDR2 or take advantage of the really low prices it goes for right now? You also want to upgrade to DDR3 down the road? Don't despair, there's such a product: MSI P35 Neo Combo.

Hardwaresecrets measured the overall performance of this motherboard using SYSmark2004 (Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity) and Quake 4 among other programs. The verdict? Overall SYSmark2004 performance was on the same level as ASUS P5B Premium (Intel P965), ASUS P5B (Intel P965) and MSI P35 Platinum (Intel P35). On Quake 4 the ASUS P5B (Intel P965) was 5.54% faster and the ASUS P5B Premium (Intel P965) was 5.71% faster.

A side note. On this motherboard they had a bug that prevented them to run their memories at 1066 MHz. Performance figures on Quake 4 compare the results with all memories running at 800 MHz, though.

In summary, 2D performance looks just fine, but 3D games may suffer a little even if you have the same memory configuration than other P965 based systems.

One of the hottest boards receives special attention from xbitlabs. It's not your average performance review, but uncovers some information nonetheless. Point in question:

- an Vdrop of around 0.8v (that's something!) for the core's voltage

- at the highest overclock, some errors pop up. They describe them as strange errors that come and go. All problems vanish once you set the FSB frequency only 5MHz lower. Considering that it works well under that premise, and that you don't even have to raise the FSB Termination Voltage or North Bridge Voltage, it seems like a small quirk that will be solved trough a BIOS realease

- the memory (Corsair Dominator TWIN2X2048-9136C5D) had to work, while overclocking to 485MHz, with lower than nominal timings; to push the memory voltage to 2.2V didn't help. Even at its nominal frequency of 1142MHz @ 2.1V, it refused to work. Maybe that's why this memory is actually certified for the Asus P5K as DDR2 1066

The implementation of the P35 chipset made by Asus has already been reviewed, but [H]Enthusiast has pitted it against all of the main chipsets currently available for Core 2: Intel P35/ ICH9R DDR2 (Asus P5K Deluxe), Intel 975X/ ICH7R (Asus P5W DH Deluxe), nForce 680i SLI MCP (EVGA nForce 680i SLI) and Intel P965 Express (Gygabyte GA-964P-DQ6). They also tossed a couple of AMD systems in the mix, just for fun: the Foxconn C51SEM2AA (nForce 590 SLI) and the Abit AN8 32X (nForce4 SLI). The first one uses DDR2 while the latter is based on old good DDR.

"The ASUS P5K3 proves to be another motherboard founded on stellar engineering culminating in great stability, excellent performance, and solid overclocking prowess. This is an expensive motherboard however and once you factor in the cost of DDR3 modules you are going to find yourself easily above a $600 upgrade investment."

Is it good? Yes. Should you buy one? Not really, it doesn't outpace other DDR2 motherboards (especially the ones based too on the P35) and DDR3 prices are expected to be high for a year or so.

Intel's Penryn dual and quad-core processors will mean a good opportunity for third party chipset makers, next year. The only competition, until now, came from nVidia, which mostly targeted the performance and mainstream segments. ATI has almost vanished from the map, with products still coming from DFI but not for a long time. And then, you have VIA, that supports Core 2 and offers good entry-level systems (AsRock, for example). It's this particular market segement that SiS will cater in Q4’2007.

SiS plans to sell both single-chip and dual-chip chipsets for Penryn. The single-chip family consists of:

- 680SCD. 1333 MHz front-side bus, support for DDR2-800 and 1066 MHz memory.
- 680SCP. 1333 MHz front-side bus, DDR2-800.
- 680SCL. 1066 MHz front-side bus, DDR2-800.
- 680SCE. 1333 MHz front-side bus, Mirage 4 graphics core.
- 680SCH. 1066 MHz front-side bus, Mirage 4 graphics core.

(*) Mirage 4 graphics core: HDCP compliant for Blu-ray and HD DVD video playback, DirectX 10, H.264 and VC-1 acceleration.

All SiS 680-series chipsets support a single PCIe x16 slot, four PCIe x1 slots, ten USB 2.0, four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports and Gigabit Ethernet. They use the same pin-outs and are drop-in compatible. We expect them to be very cheap.

In the first half of 2008 SiS is to begin sampling the dual-chip versions, but unless they turn out to be a surprise in the performance area, no enthusiast looking for a dual PCIe x16 slot motherboard will take them seriously.

Link: DailyTech.

Hexus has taken a look at the P5K3 Premium motherboard from Asus, that will be displayed tomorrow (June 5) at Computex. As you can see in the picture below, they've installed both memory and heatspreaders.

Are these good news to you? Depends on what you want from a motherboard. If you like high performing, overclocking friendly, trouble free products... this is a good choice. Having the manufacturer select the RAM for you, eludes potential RMA problems. On the other hand, if you dream with graphics cards that can be fully customized (PCB, GPU and memory sold separately)... this is not a very good indication that we're headed that way.

Out of the box chipset heatsinks are usually of bad quality, and thermal grease can be called almost everything except "thermal". Is there any reason to believe the situation will change when they decide to outfit memory with it's own solution?