Stephen ECS X48T-A @ Guru3D
“Typically an X48 chipset based mainboard will start at roughly 250 USD. The two chips the mainboard manufacturer has to purchase from Intel total up towards 90 USD alone. Pretty high-end gear for sure as Intel’s X48 chipset brings support for the all new 1600 MHz FSB processors, two 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots, which you can use for ATI CrossFire, two ATI graphics cards and heaps of nice features.”
ASUS P5QL-E @ OC Club
“When it came to overclocking the Intel Core 2 Q9450 on the ASUS P5QL-E I ran into a few problems getting it stable anywhere above 2940MHz (420×7). Leaving all of the voltage settings on auto, I was able to get the FSB frequency all the way up to 400MHz with a multiplier of 7x. However, I did end up jumping to 1.355V on the CPU voltage to get it stable at 420MHz x 7 Multi giving me the speed of 2940MHz.”
ECS GF8200A Black Series @ Hardware Secrets
“GF8200A Black Series is an entry-level socket AM2+ motherboard with on-board video from ECS based on GeForce 8200 (MCP78M-A) chipset from nVidia. Since it features an HDMI output, this board is clearly targeted to users willing to build a media center PC based on an AMD CPU like Athlon X2. In this review we will compare the performance of GeForce 8200 to its main competitor, AMD 780G. Check it out.”
MSI P45 Platinum @ Motherboards.org
“The board was stable throughout testing and performed about on average with other P45 boards we have seen. One cool feature of the board is the GreenPower utility which can save energy when enabled. This is similar in concept to the EPU on ASUS motherboards and the Dynamic Energy Saver on the Gigabyte motherboards.”
ASUS Rampage Formula @ Au-Ja!
“We really liked Intel’s X48 chipset when we first reviewed it using DDR3 memory. But DDR2 is still cheaper and plenty of customers would like to take their old memory onto their new mainboard. The ASUS Rampage Formula combines Intel’s X48 chipset with DDR2 memory and this combination looks very promising.”
MSI P45 Platinum @ TweakTown
“Today we have an early market sample of MSI’s P45 Platinum which is their top of the range board, this designed to compete with both ASUS’ and GIGABYTE’s ultra high-end P45 offerings. While it doesn’t have the full retail packaging included, we’ve confirmed with MSI that it’s the final revision board in our labs.”
Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L @ Hardware Secrets
“We took a look on GA-EP31-DS3L, a motherboard from Gigabyte based on Intel P31 chipset targeted to the mainstream market, coming with a lot of features and a relatively low cost. Check it out!”
Intel P45 Vs. X48 Crossfire @ TweakTown
“While there are a few differences between the two, we only cared about one of them. We wanted to know the performance difference between the X48 and the P45 when running Crossfire. While both boards carry two physical x16 slots, when two cards are installed the electronics behind the slots on the P45 tune back to x8 on both slots.”
ASUS Crosshair II Formula @ OC Club
“While going over this review I tried to think of something that I disliked about the Crosshair II and for once, I cannot find anything that is a negative about it. The price is on the high side, but considering the performance the Crosshair II showed and the wealth of utilities, extras, and addons, it is justifiable since you do get what you pay for.”
MSI P45 Platinum @ OC Club
“A song from the group Disturbed comes to mind here, “Down with the Sickness.” The P45 Platinum is the first and only motherboard I have been able to get a Quad core processor over 500MHz. In fact, 515MHz was achieved and was stable enough to run some of our benchmark suite. 515MHz is a great validation screen shot but I wanted to find out where I could gain a measure of stability without having to cook my little piece of silicon.”