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This is the ASUS P5Q Deluxe Intel P45 motherboard that features power and performance at a very attractive price point. The P45 chipset comes home with a bang.

Tweak Town have given the ASUS P5Q Deluxe motherboard a hands-on review over 15 pages and in their final thoughts they said “ASUS has always put out impressive boards, and the ASUS P5Q Deluxe is without a doubt one of ASUS’ most impressive boards to come from the Taiwanese company.

ASUS always puts a huge amount of time and effort into their boards and it’s with great pride they only put out great boards.

The P5Q Deluxe is without a doubt a board I would consider in my own personal system. Its support for Crossfire finally comes with a balanced x8/x8 setup and the next gen 16-phase voltage regulation system makes for an efficient voltage setup.

The additional onboard features including eSATA, Drive Xpert RAID backup and dual Gigabit Ethernet is the icing on the cake”.

Read the 15 page review.

This is the GIGABYTE GA MA78GM S2H 780G motherboard, and the performance is on par with 780G boards, but its ability to overclock makes it a much better option for a HTPC with some kick. HDMI, eSATA and FireWire make this the ultimate HTPC board.

Tweak Town have given this motherboard a full hands-on review over 13 pages, and in their final thoughts they said, “Overall, the 780G chipset is extremely impressive; that much is certain. However, it’s usually put into cut-down boards using the Micro-ATX format. While this makes for a great HTPC, some of the potential of the 780G chipset is left unused.

GIGABYTE has done a fantastic job with this board. While it’s aimed at the HTPC users and even the office environments, it still has a bit of kick in it in regards to overclocking.

While it’s not able to push the boundaries like that of Core 2, it’s still able to give the AMD platform a kick in the pants and we know that AMD is no where near as easy to overclock as Intel since there are more tweaks needed to get them to run in a stable fashion”.

Read the 13 page review.

First off, we talk about the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi. In all, it’s a board that while having all the bells and whistles you could want, some of them come at a price. This for instance is the dual memory support. While great for the up-graders in us, the placement of the power connectors suffer; not good at all for over-clockers.

The other major gripe is that if you want to use eSATA, you have to run two cables from the bottom of the board to the top left of the board. This not only gives you two less SATA ports internally, but again, you’re getting more cable clutter. With digital switching readily available, why wasn’t this used? - Or better yet, a two port SATA controller to run the eSATA system independently?

Last on the list of complaints is again the lack of digital switching for the PCI Express slots. If you want to use Crossfire, you have to use an old style paddle card that splits the bandwidth.

The P43R1600Twins-WiFi board, while almost a mirror image of the P45R2000-WiFi, it lacks Crossfire support. So this is eliminated for dual GPU users unless you settle on a HD 3870X2 or HD 4870X2 (when it arrives). Next; again due to the dual memory controllers, you lose out on power connector placements. And the routing of the SATA cable to run the single eSATA port means more cable clutter and the loss of one internal SATA port.

Read the full 17 page review over at TweakTown

This is the XFX nForce 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and with XFX being one of NVIDIA’s biggest partners, expectations are high for this board.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be another NVIDIA reference clone; this makes the choice of which board to get an easier one. The features and extras bundled with the XFX offering also make it a prime mover.

Tweak Town have given this motherboard a full hands-on review and this is what they said in their final thoughts “One thing is for sure, NVIDIA has done a fantastic job on its reference design. Not only have they managed to fit just about every possible expansion option into their boards, but also 3-Way SLI is standard, it overclocks quite well and it supports the latest generation of CPUs.

Having said that, when companies just sell NVIDIA reference boards, this is where things get a bit boring. When two or more companies have identical looking and performing boards, it’s hard to recommend one over the other. In fact, there is no way to do it; this is where real motherboard makers like MSI, ASUS and GIGABYTE come in with their own styles and designs that do make a difference; in all, a better looking board.

XFX has simply slapped their sticker on the NVIDIA reference board, which is the same as what ZOTAC has done with theirs. So if you’re tossing up between these two, either will do as there are no differences to speak of”.

Read the 14 page review.

Written by Daniel for Product Reviews
In Sections: Computer Hardware, Computers
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This is the ASRock A780FullDisplayPort Motherboard and while it performs as well as the ASUS 780G motherboard, its lack of HDMI and bad placement of onboard connectors make it a little hard to recommend over the other 780G Micro-ATX boards.

With AMD’s 780G chipset getting a lot of good press Tweak Town thought they would give the ASRock A780FullDisplayPort Motherboard a hands-on review and the results have been covered over 13 pages.

In their final thoughts they said, “ASRock’s latest series of boards have been reasonably impressive, however we still have a few issues with the layout of this particular board. First, the locations of the power connectors need a bit of work. Even for a cheap board, it’s still not acceptable.

ASRock has managed to bring some good prices to the market with their latest series of boards; while we didn’t get the full retail package with this board, we aren’t expecting a huge amount of additional features in the box. What was disappointing was not having the DisplayPort card included, which eliminated this from testing.

Overall, the board has good potential for a HTPC as long as you’re not after 5.1 audio or HDMI”

Read the 13 page review.

Written by Daniel for Product Reviews
In Sections: Computer Hardware, Computers
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X48 Crossfire Performance is already on the market, but the Intel P45 motherboard is not out until later this year however; this does not stop people like TweakTown from putting the pair through their paces. There are a few differences between the two boards, but there is only one thing that matters, and that is with the performance of each board.

Check out what TweakTown has to say, here are their final thoughts “This is really a very interesting article and is something people need to be taking note of. The first thing you need to be checking is if you’re reading a review where Crossfire is being tested. Make sure that the board there using is a x16 / x16 motherboard. The results really do speak for themselves and it’s clear that there is a performance difference between a x16 / x16 configuration which the X48 offers, and the x8/x8 one on the P45.
If you’re really thinking about going down the Crossfire path, we would be highly recommending that you spend the extra money to go to an X38 or X48 based motherboard over the P45. Of course, if you’re not then it doesn’t really matter. With one card the P45 runs at x16, which is exactly what you want.

The thing is, the X48-DQ6 is only about 10% more expensive, so you could easily say that you should just spend the extra money and get that. You may in future go Crossfire without knowing it yet, but admittedly the P45-DQ6 does have some very cool features such as the new ICH10R controller, loads of SATA ports and just some really funky new add-ons like the power buttons on board. Of course, we will cover all these in more detail in our full motherboard review at a later date.

Before you rush out and buy that P45 board thinking that x8 / x8 will be just fine, sit back and have a think if you’re really aiming to go down the Crossfire path in the near future.”

Written by Peter for Product Reviews
In Sections: Computer Hardware, Computers
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MSI have launched the P45 Platinum, this is their top of the range motherboard which has been designed to compete with the likes of Asus and Gigabyte, both of which have high-end P45 offerings. TweakTown has one of these motherboards and has been putting it through its paces.

One thing that we have to point out though, is the fact that their MSI P45 Platinum is an early sample. This means that it is not the full retail package, but the board will be the same that will hit the store shelves. Here are TweakTown’s final thoughts about the board “Intel’s 4 series chipsets are now starting to make mass production. With Computex 2008 finished, and Intel’s official launch of the final chipsets to make the 4 series now unveiled, motherboard companies are able to finally release their boards. As expected, we are now beginning to see quite a few offerings surface.

MSI’s first P45 motherboard has impressed us; despite not having a full retail package with the board, the silicon used was retail quality, so we are testing what you will receive on the store shelves, and what we have found to be very impressive.

The P45 chipset has a good overall feel; its overclocking at this early stage is impressive, and while we only managed to hit 504MHz FSB, we only had a few hours to really test the board compared to a full 24 hrs of tweaking. In just 2 hours we managed to make over 500MHz. We can only see a better result if given more time to play.”

Written by Peter for Product Reviews
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When it comes to motherboards, the consumer has never had so much choice and Intel have now got a total of 12 different chipsets. This gives you a great range of performance levels and features for all types of users. NVIDIA have entered the market with its nForce 790i and 780i chipsets to increase this choice even further, and with Intel’s P45 replacing the P35 and becoming the brands mainstream chipset…the motherboard world is looking good.

Tweak Town have created a 17-page report on the specifications, benchmarks and more for two-GIGABYTE motherboards based around the P45 chipset. In their final thoughts they said “Intel’s P45 Express chipset hasn’t officially hit the market yet (it will launch shortly at Computex in Taipei), this is why we haven’t been able to give a huge amount of detailed features on the P45 Northbridge or its ICH10R companion chip, however, what we were able to get is based on testing as well as early information from our board provider.

P45 in its early form looks the goods! While it’s early days, we haven’t been able to test its overclocking ability, and this is something that will really determine if the board is able to take the crown away from the P35 – we are just waiting for the final revision boards to start arriving for testing. We have been able to hit speeds beyond 550MHz with P35 based boards, so P45 has some big shoes to fill, that’s for sure.

Some of the major changes are welcomed especially the inclusion of PCIe 2.0 interface, increased DDR-2 speeds of 1066MHz, matching the speeds AMD is now supporting with its Phenom X3 and X4 processors, making Intel still a major player in DDR2, even though they are still pushing for DDR3.

GIGABYTE’s EP45-DS3R and EP45-DQ6 in our early tests have proven to be fantastic. We managed to get the system perfectly stable, running Vista without any problems. We were very happy with the feel of the board as well as the initial performance. We will continue with overclocking tests and power usage using the DES as soon as we are able to get more time with the boards. For now we hope you enjoyed our preview into some upcoming P45 boards and there will be plenty more on this subject from us once we are finished at Computex early next month.”

Read the 17 page review.

Written by Daniel for Product Reviews
In Sections: Computer Hardware, Computers
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abit has done a fine job with their new I-N73HD GeForce 7100 Motherboard, the layout is very tidy for such a small board. There are just two DDR2 memory slots and hiding behind them are the 24-pin power connector as well as the IDE and FDD connectors. The motherboard is only limited to 2GB of memory, but as you will not be running SLI graphics as well as high-end games this is more than enough to keep things running sweet.

Tweaktow have a in-depth review of the abit I-N73HD GeForce 7100 Motherboard, and they have some mixed feelings on this piece of hardware, here are there thoughts” NVIDIAs GeForce 7 series of integrated chipsets do fill in a void, giving you a choice for an integrated system that isn’t based on an Intel chipset. However, with the performance of this chipset compared to a G33 and G35 these days, Intel’s chipset has the option to run six SATA ports over the aging four that NVIDIA has. And the lack of Hybrid SLI on the GeForce 7 IGP based setups leaves them in direct competition with Intel for the IGP chipset of choice, something that Intel is currently winning, especially since G35 now has DX10 support under Vista.
The layout of the board is extremely clean, and its power and overclocking features do give it a heads up over the Intel IGP based chipsets which really leave a bit to be desired on overclocking. This makes the NVIDIA chipset a lot better, especially on memory overclocking. Asynchronous memory clocks are something NVIDIA introduced and continue to support, even on its IGP based boards.

abit has again done a fantastic job. While known for more of its high-end boards, the company now offers value boards that are extremely attractive options on the market. Overall, we found the board to have a great feel and good overclocking for the budget users.”

Source

Written by Peter for Product Reviews
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You may have heard of Coolink’s GFXChilla that showed the world how good it was as a VGA cooler, this is the Coolink ChipChilla Chipset Cooler, which has had a hands-on review by Tweak Town, and they take a look at how good this device is on an NVIDIA 680i board. Whether you are going for high 3DMark numbers or a quiet computing experience, the ChipChilla will help you achieve your goals.

Tweak Town said the “Coolink ChipChilla is a solid product that is versatile enough to last you for many years and motherboard upgrades. The ChipChilla is also efficient; our testing has shown that the product is better than the NVIDIA Reference Design Cooler, and by a large margin. The best feature of the ChipChilla though is its ability to perform virtually silent, even when running at full load.

View the 7 page hands-on on Tweak Town.

Written by Daniel for Product Reviews
In Sections: Computer Hardware, Computers
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