PC Motherboard And Chipset Reviews And News
There's nobody quite like Mom and when it comes to performance desktop computers or business class workhorse machines, motherboards are always what bring the computing family together. Motherboards house all PC components from the processor, to memory and storage. Here you'll find our coverage on big motherboard brands and products from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, ASRock and many more, along with the chipsets from AMD and Intel that power the PC Master Race.
When ASUS unveiled their Republic of Gamers (ROG) series of products, they stated their mission clearly: "deliver the most innovative and best performing PC solutions to enhance the usage experience for power users". There's a lot in that statement to live up to, but ASUS was confident in their abilities. Over the years that we...
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We generally don’t use integrated graphics. You might not use integrated graphics. But there are more motherboards with integrated graphics sold than discrete cards, according to data published last year by Jon Peddie Research. That means you probably have friends and family buying systems with built-in graphics engines. Guess what happens...
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In preparation for the impending arrival of Intel’s more affordable 45nm quad-core Yorkfield and dual-core Wolfdale processors, motherboard manufacturers have been readying a slew of new products to properly support the CPUs. Many of these motherboard products are based on Intel’s recent chipset offerings, including the X38 and brand...
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Prior to holding its Financial Analyst Day in New York City, AMD showed off some new CrossFire-related technology to a few select members of the press. What we saw was AMD’s Hybrid CrossFire and its associated hardware, which marries next-generation integrated graphics processors (IGP) and entry-level discreet graphics cards for increased...
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A few days ago, AMD officially unveiled their RV670 GPU, the chip at the heart of the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series of graphics cards. Just in case you missed it on the day of the launch, our coverage of the new Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3850 cards is available right here. While we did thoroughly explain the RV670’s architecture...
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If you're a PC hardware enthusiast - and chances are pretty good that you are if you're reading HotHardware - Asus is a company that needs no introduction. Asus' track record for building quality products targeted squarely at power users is well known and documented, so we'll forego the history lesson here and get right to the point....
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Back in February of this year, we took a look at the AMD 690 series chipset and praised it for its affordability, power efficiency, and strong performance relative to its competition. Since then, the 690 series chipset has gone on to be somewhat of a success for AMD with over 35 different motherboards based on various flavors the chipset...
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It’s been almost one year since Intel launched the 965 series of chipsets, which were originally designed to be packaged with Intel’s Core 2 Duo series of processors. While the 965 series didn't perform quite as well as Intel’s flagship 975x chipset in some cases, most notable in multi-GPU configurations, it made a name for itself due to its...
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At the end of February '07, AMD released their first new chipset since the AMD/ATI merger. The goal with the new 690G/V series was to bring improved integrated graphics to the market, with better performance and broader compatibility. Initial impressions were generally positive; with an integrated Radeon XPress 1250, support for two monitors...
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For almost as long as there have been PC enthusiasts, it seems that Asus has been there catering to them with feature laden, high-performance products. Nowhere is it more apparent that Asus caters to enthusiasts than with their motherboards. Yes, some of their notebooks and graphics cards are cutting edge as well, but the company has...
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With no major processor architecture updates in the immediate future and their DX10-capable graphics solutions still a few months away, the new AMD seems to be slowly picking up slack as we roll through the first two thirds of Q1 '07. Today, AMD is officially introducing their first new chipset since the ATI acquisition,...
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Nvidia's newly launched nForce 680i SLI for Intel's Core 2 processors is undoubtedly the most lavish, extravagant, and exiting chipset currently on the market. This chipset, which we recently looked at in depth with our review of the high-end Asus Striker board, features such features like DDR-1200 memory support, triple PCI Express...
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There are only a few motherboard makers today who don't design boards with the enthusiast in mind. It's been proven that the enthusiast market, as small as it is, gets the most press coverage of any segment of motherboards. Thus, enthusiast markets do have the ability to influence purchases of an entire company's range of motherboards....
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By now you're all familiar with Intel's Core micro-architecture, as well as the dual and quad-core Core 2 Duo, Extreme, and Quad processors based on it. With the launch of their Core 2 processors, Intel no longer played second fiddle to AMD in terms of overall performance or power efficiency. And for the last few months since their...
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In the last two years, we've seen a major push for home theater PC's by big names in the computer industry. Intel is pushing their ViiV initiative for HTPC market, AMD is pushing their competing AMD Live! program, and of course, Microsoft got in the game with their Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. While the product...
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Stepping back to look at who has the largest market share in the chipset sector for AMD socket AM2 processors, it's clear who is on top and who is not. Take virtually any major motherboard manufacturer and see what they have to offer and in most cases, NVIDIA chipset solutions are going to dominate the...
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When news first broke that Abit was going to be purchased by USI earlier this year, it seemed unlikely that Abit would continue their long-running tradition of producing enthusiast level motherboards. After all, USI is a much more traditional electronics company, and enthusiast/overclocking platforms didn't seem like they would...
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It's easy to sit back and say "he was a good boy -- he took it on the chin like a man", or so to speak, as the good folks at Intel would like to say about their rivals at Advanced Micro Devices. Conversely, you might quickly discover the error of your ways, if you've counted AMD out. As we're sure...
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The call of most computing enthusiasts or workstation professionals has always been "more power, more bandwidth and more features, please". The advent of serial PCI Express-based computer architectures was the foundation of an enabling technology that provided a much needed solution to the bottleneck problems...
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Last month, Intel officially launched their new Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors with much fanfare. Based on the heavily hyped "Conroe" core and utilizing the modern "Core" microarchitecture, as opposed to the NetBurst microarchitecture employed in the Pentium 4 and Pentium D, Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core...
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Six to nine months prior to the launch of Intel's Core 2 Duo product line, if you polled the average HotHardware.com reader, regarding their thoughts on an Intel 975X based motherboard, you might well have gotten a luke-warm reception. Back then AMD's dual core Athlon 64 X2 and FX offerings were in full stride and NVIDIA's...
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Market share is the name of the game in the Computing industry and AMD has been slowly chipping away at Intel's market share over the past few years, with the release of faster Desktop processor cores with significantly better performance per watt, clock-cycle and dollar. AMD's performance advantage also...
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