Any Fool Can Build A Motherboard

Nvidia only released one chipset in its nForce 500 series for Intel, however, since it was based on the older, poorly overclocking nForce 4 SPP northbridge, Nvidia quickly dumped 500 series for Intel, which gave birth to nForce 600i series chipsets. Today there are four chipsets in the 600i series, 680i SLI, 680i LT SLI, 650i SLI and 650i Ultra in order from high-end to value.

nForce 680i SLI while offering the best features and performance also costs an arm and a leg for just the board, leaving little in the budget for a high-end CPU. Nvidia has however come to the rescue with a slightly cut down version of the 680i SLI, the LT SLI series.

P35 based boards have been on sale for a couple of weeks now. Even if we're still several days away from it's official launch date, it somehow feels like this kind of comparison was overdue.

If you get lost with chipset names, just remember what the new motherboards will bring: 1333 FSB and DDR3 (optional). The good thing about the higher FSB, is that you can overclock current CPUs a 25% without having to worry about memory dividers or anything else. Take that as a gift. On the other hand, DDR3 is nothing to get excited about right now, as numbers on Anandtech's short review indicate.

Does the P965 continue to be the enthusiast's choice? No, because you're not forced to use DDR3 with the new chipset, and even if DDR2 performs better... it works best with the new breed of boards.

We recently had an opportunity to see a AMD A690G chipset system running a copy of Far Cry without any frameloss and plenty of detail. Very impressive. Onboard graphics usually suck but AMD have produced one of the first decent solutions. Okay you won't be playing Crysis at full whack but for budget builders a motherboard with a trade price of around £35 including decent graphics is nothing to be sneezed at. Foxconn today launched three new motherboards based on the AMD A690G chipset, built for AMD AM2 processors. The A690GM2MA series motherboards offer advanced graphics capability out of the box with full DirectX 9.0 support thanks to the onboard ATI Radeon™ X1250 graphics processor. These motherboards include TV-Out and DVI outputs for flexibility in home, office and media PC applications. The A690GM2MA series is a good choice for digital home and office PCs.

According to EVGA, their new nForce 680i LT SLI motherboard will provide 680i performance at a more cost effective price for many PC enthusiasts. With all the features packed into this motherboard, it will be interesting to see how it compares to the current top performing nForce 680i boards such as Asus' Striker Extreme and EVGA's own somewhat troubled nForce 680i SLI board.

Motherboards.org have a juicy Review of the LT SLI.

Filling the price gap between the high-end nForce 680i SLI and more affordable 650i SLI chipsets, without sacrificing any advanced features, motherboard manufacturer Asus has created a hybrid motherboard chipset in cooperation with NVIDIA, dubbed the "Dual X16 SLI". Designed for the Intel platform, the chipset combination employed on the P5N32-E SLI Plus motherboard offers true, dual PCI Express x16 electrical connections for graphics, dual Gig-E LAN support and a slew of other features found on high-end 680i boards.

HotHardware pits the P5N32-E SLI Plus up against an nForce 680i SLI to see if Asus' hybrid chipset approach truly offers all of the performance of the more expensive 680i SLI for a fraction of the cost.

Abit Back On Track

The ABIT AW9D-MAX motherboard is based on Intel's top of the line 975X Express and ICH7R chipsets, packs in quite a lot to get excited about. This high end desktop chipset enables the AW9D-MAX to accommodate 533/800/1066MHz FSB Intel socket 775 processors. The four memory slots can be filled with up to 8GB of unbuffered ECC/non-ECC DDR2-800 RAM. Standard equipment on the motherboard includes dual PCI Express based GigABIT network cards, ABIT's AudioMAX High Definition 7.1 channel audio controller, eight 3GB/s SATAII channels, Firewire IEEE 1394a and two additional two port Silicon Image SiI3132 Serial ATA II/RAID controllers.

They even have Gigabyte in NZ!

Gigabyte's N680SLI-DQ6 is 680i on steroid; the motherboard offers quad Gigabit LAN, 10x SATA II ports, quad 3-phase power circuit, silent heatpipe cooling, Dolby Digital Live, DTS Connect encoding, and lots of small improvements over the reference Nvidia 680i design. 

Don't panic if the page takes longer than  a minute to load - it's NZ and they still use tin cans over there 

 We recently had the chance to see the new ASUS M2A-VM motherboard in action at a press event and were suitably impressed by the power offered from such a cheap board. It can run Far Cry at a decent resolution without any slow down using the on board ATI graphics chipset. It even offers a DVI connection as standard. With a shelf life till May 2008 and the promise of direct X10 compatability via a future bios upgrade, this is a cracking motherboard for budget users and system builders.

Chile Hardware recently tested this ASUS motherboard and while it won't replace your 3GHz Core 2 Duo with twin 8800GTX cards, it is one of the first motherboards with decent onboard graphics that you can actually play games with.

 ASUS have currently enjoyed the number one spot for sometime now as king of the 965 chipset arena. Their ASUS P5B Deluxe is a stonking board and received top honours in our labs.

Now under the Universal abit brand name, the bad ass attitude of ABIT is back with a vengeance. Tweaktown tested three motherboards under the Universal abit brand - A8N 32X, AB9 Pro and the IN9 32X SLI motherboards and found out that they all performed quite well with the exception of the latter which failed to impressed with very poor overclocking results.

Today they have a new motherboard based on Intel’s P965 chipset, the same that was used in the AB9 Pro board, but with a few updates to the design and layout.

It is aimed at taking on ASUS and Gigabyte’s Crossfire dual graphics based Intel P965 motherboard and by the looks of things, the AB9 QuadGT is able to produce a motherboard for your Core 2 processor which packs some punch.