It’s
amazing how things change, four years ago the
choice of enthusiast motherboards for Intel was
far from being in a strong position. With regards
to stability and value - users were well
catered for, however the performance dominance
of the AMD chips at the time meant that feature
packed, high end boards were out of reach. Later
P4 chips with higher clockrates, caches and multiple
cores did help to make the Intel brand appealing
to enthusiasts. The ability to sell higher volumes
of performance motherboards meant the number of
products available began to increase significantly.
Histrionics
aside the real turning point for Intel was the
release of the Core 2 line of processors which
returned them to the position of undisputed performance
leader at every price point. With this development
the market became much more attractive to just
about every motherboard manufacturer and chipset
maker.
A
few months back we took a look at the first real
generation of Core2 boards which were based on
the Intel 975x chipset. At the time it was arguably
the best chipset available for the Core2, however
in recent times both AMD and Nvidia have taken
a stab at stealing the performance crown with
their 680i and 690 chipsets respectively. Our
first look at the 680i was hugely disappointing
with the early reference designs being plagued
with problems, ranging from PS2 keyboard compatibility
issues to quad core bugs. That said, some manufacturers
took a little more time to bring their products
to market and so with this in mind we revisit
the chipset in the form of Abit's IN9 32X-MAX.
The recently released Fatality F-I90HD is the
second product on test today, based on the brand
new AMD 690 chipset it is a more budget conscious
board with great potential to compete with the
more expensive models. Finally we have Intel's
D975XBX2, an updated version of the original XBX
which is the best Intel board we have used to
date.
Let’s
see if Intel can hold on to that title or if the
Nvidia or AMD based board is the more attractive
purchase ...
