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.

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