Motherboard Buyer's Guide

Early adopters be warned – there are only a handful of X58 motherboards have been released so far, which means your options are limited (and pricey) if you want to build a Core i7 machine. If you’re willing to throw down the big bucks to go the Nahalem route, here are your choices for building a cutting-edge rig.

Asus P6T Deluxe

Hallelujah, P6T Deluxe ushers in the era of graphics revolution

Asus’s P6T Deluxe isn’t the most over-the-top Core i7 board we’ve tested, but it certainly has a leg up on Intel’s bare-bones DX58SO. For one thing, it finally brings us graphics reunification by supporting both two-card SLI and CrossFire X configurations.

Click here for the rest of the review, benchmarks, and our verdict!

MSI Eclipse SLI

Alphabet soup heaven: Tri-SLI, i7, and X-Fi

An eclipse occurs when one celestial body obscures another. When MSI stuck its X58 motherboard with that moniker, we wondered just what it wanted to hide. Our guess is it’s the fact that the board supports ATI’s CrossFire X. Despite the Eclipse’s support for CrossFire X, MSI chose to change the name of the board at the last minute from simply Eclipse to Eclipse SLI. Regardless, the Eclipse SLI is jam-packed with features that would make any geek weep, including cross-platform GPU support, Core i7, six-slot DDR3, and onboard soft X-Fi audio.

We’ve now tested three X58 boards, and the Eclipse SLI has an edge over its closest competitor, the Asus P6T Deluxe, which we reviewed in January, as well as the stock Intel DX58SO board that we used for most of our Core i7 testing. The Eclipse SLI is technically able to run tri-SLI. We say technically because though you might be able to jam a GTX 280 into the third slot, you’ll probably have to saw off the end of the card to make it fit in your case—the card has to be seated in the bottom slot and hangs over the mobo by about an inch. We tested the Eclipse with a pair of EVGA GTX 280 cards but were unable to test it in tri, as our early board shipped without a bridge. MSI will include bridges with retail boards.

Right now, it’s difficult to compare the performance of the three X58-based boards we’ve tested, as it’s challenging to make sure the boards are all set to the same specs. We attribute most of the performance differences we’ve seen to how each vendor sets up the CPU, not to the performance differences with each board. One thing in the Eclipse’s favor: There’s no need to activate the X-Fi drivers on the board, which is necessary on the Asus boards that feature host-based X-Fi drivers.

So what board would we stick our Core i7 in? It’s hard to say at this point, but if we were forced to choose, the Eclipse SLI would just edge out the Asus P6T Deluxe. But to be honest, with BIOS updates coming out in near real time for the new CPU and new chipset, the answer to that question might be different next month.

Verdict: 9

Not ready to jump to Intel’s Core i7? No problem, the market has plenty of alternatives to offer 

Sometimes it pays to wait. AMD’s and Intel’s older CPU lineups might not be the hot new tickets, but they are safe, stable, and endowed with terrific price/performance ratios.

Need more reasons to hold off on Core i7? We’ll give you four: First, every motherboard and chipset designed for this CPU is as new as it is, so there are bugs aplenty to be wrung out of them. Why pay top dollar to act as a beta tester?

Second, you’ll need to run three sticks of DDR3 memory in order to achieve the best performance.

Third, motherboards compatible with Intel’s new baby are only just now trickling out.

Fourth, your good buddy with the obsession for upgrading to the latest hardware (suckah!) just gave you one hell of a deal on his old Core 2 Quad (or Phenom X4). Besides, all that, the land of Core 2 motherboards is target rich: Depending on your CPU, you could pick up something as ancient as an Intel 975X or 965 board.

Intel’s P35 and X38 lineups are next, and the latest Intel dynamic duo is the P45 and X48. We recommend the P45 for the best CPU compatibility, and the X48 if you want to light up CrossFire. Interested in SLI? Nvidia’s 680i is a classic, or there’s the updated 780i or 790i series. Nvidia also offers  the economical 750i and 730i chipsets.

AMD’s Phenom doesn’t have quite the lineup that Intel does, but the pickin’s aren’t slim. AMD’s own 790FX is displacing Nvidia among multi-GPU users. AMD’s integrated chipset has much to offer, including the ability to combine the integrated GPU with a discrete part in a hybrid Crossfire mode.

Click to check out Intel Core-Logic Cagematch: Motherboard Roundup!

Asus Maximus II Formula

Nerds, start your engines! 

People who buy motherboards with mainstream chipsets such as the P45 don’t want to pay for DDR3. At least, that’s the way it seems to us. Asus’s impressive Maximus II Formula is the third P45-based board we’ve tested, and not one of them sports DDR3 slots. But that doesn’t take anything away from the MIIF, the coolest P45 board we’ve encountered.

With its subdued heatsink, motherboard-based X-Fi support, and oversized start and reset buttons, the Maximus II Formula sports some slick features. It performs quite ably too. MSI’s more garish P45 Platinum outpaces the MIIF by a small margin in some benchmarks, but the MIIF led the MSI and a Gigabyte P45 board in RAM speeds by good margins. So, we’ll call it a wash.

Click here too check out the rest of the review! 

Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6

Generous offerings make this P45 board unique

If you don’t just like Gigabit ports—you love them— Gigabyte’s GA-EP45-DQ6 is the motherboard for you. This mobo has four Gigabit ports that can be teamed together for one seriously fat-ass network connection.

The board is typical Gigabyte in other respects; it includes surface-mounted buttons and the most clearly marked USB and FireWire ports we’ve ever seen. If you nuke your USB drive because you plugged  it into a FireWire header, it’s your own fault, brother.

Click here to check out the rest of the review!

MSI P45 Platinum

A budget mobo you can count on

We admit it, sexy chipsets such as Nvidia’s nForce 790i SLI Ultra and Intel’s X48 get all the ink; but in reality, most of the world runs on plain-vanilla chipsets such as Intel’s new P45. And the truth is, you don’t necessarily give up performance or features when you choose a middle-of-the-road board; in fact, the affordable MSI Platinum has just about everything you’d want in a motherboard.

Let’s start with the chipset: Intel’s new P45 gives you far more features than Intel’s X38 and X48 higher-end chipsets. The P45 Platinum adds PCI-E 2.0 to this mainstream chipset and is the first mobo to use the new ICH10 south bridge, which lets you shut off individual USB or SATA ports to prevent people from stealing your data. (The new south bridge was rumored to add 10Gb Ethernet, but that’s not the case.)

Click here to check out the rest of the review!

EVGA eForce 790i Ultra SLI

The seven series done right

We weren’t impressed with Nvidia’s follow-up to the popular 680i chipset. The 780i felt like a retread of the original and lacked support for Intel’s top proc: the 1,600MHz FSB Core 2 Extreme QX9770. Plus, PCI Express 2.0 was simply tacked on as an extra chip and DDR3 support was glaringly absent.

Nvidia heard our complaints and created the 790i chipset, represented here by EVGA’s Ultra SLI board. It has native PCI-E 2.0, 1,600MHz FSB support, and DDR3. This board even addresses another shortcoming of the 680i and 780i reference boards: lack of eSATA.  

Click here to check out the rest of the review!

MSI P35 Combo Platinum

DDR2 or DDR3—it’s your choice! 

You can change CPU sockets, dump PCI, and jettison legacy ports all day long, but nothing, absolutely nothing, pisses people off like moving to a new type of RAM. Luckily, there’s a fallback: dual-format RAM motherboards such as MSI’s P35 Combo Platinum board.

Based on Intel’s P35 chipset, the Combo Platinum will take up to four DDR2 modules or two DDR3 modules. But don’t think about running them simultaneously—it’s impossible. You’ll also have to run a pair of funky blank adapters to get the board running.

Click here to check out the rest of the review!

Gigabyte MS 790GP-DS4H

Integrated graphics that don’t suck (much)

Pardon us, but crowing that your integrated graphics chip is better than your competitor’s integrated graphics chip is a bit like bragging that your D is better than your friend’s D-.

As sad as that is, it’s the tack AMD is taking with its 790GX chipset, which Gigabyte’s MA790GP-DS4H mobo is based on. While the chipset features DirectX 10 support and indeed might be faster than other integrated graphics solutions, it’s still slower than the ancient GeForce 7600 GS.

The 790GX does support a hybrid mode, which allows you to pair an equally weak Radeon HD 3400-class GPU with the board. By adding the subpar performance of the Radeon to the integrated graphics, you immediately realize you should have purchased a better videocard.

What’s interesting about the 790GX is that it scales from dirt-poor integrated, to illogical hybrid support, all the way up to full CrossFire. The MA790GP-DS4H takes full advantage of the CrossFire slots and lets you run two GPUs at full x16 PCI-E 2.0 data rates. However, Gigabyte makes a faux pas by pointing the SATA ports straight up. Running two double-wide GPUs in the board cuts off several SATA ports.

The real news is the inclusion of AMD’s new SB750 south-bridge chip, which adds RAID 5, additional SATA ports, and the ability to directly overclock the CPU further than you could before, theoretically. Our Phenom overclocks have been good but not stellar, and we didn’t seem to get much further with the new SB750.

Benchmark performance was all over the map, with particularly low hard drive scores. Only after installing a patch provided to the media (with the warning that it could result in data loss) did we see performance actually match that of boards based on the 790FX chipset. We imagine that final drivers will include the patch, but it’s obvious to us that the MA 790GP-DS4H’s drivers weren’t fully baked for the release, so color us unimpressed. 

Verdict: 6

www.gigabyte.com.tw

Buying Your Next Motherboard

You’ve read the verdicts, now it’s time to decide

As much as we like Intel’s new Core i7, the results here demonstrate that there’s still plenty of life in the older platforms. We were a bit disappointed by the 790GX’s performance but it is a completely new chipset and there are bugs to be wrung out. We won’t totally count it out and plan to revisit the chipset in other boards.

On the SLI front, EVGA’s 790i Ultra SLI board is a darling. It’s based on Nvidia’s reference design, but that’s not bad—it means that BIOS updates come directly from Nvidia. Obviously, it’s also the only board here that supports Nvidia multi-card SLI feature, so that makes it the top pick for a gamer looking to run two or more Nvidia cards for high-resolution gaming. One note for multi-GPU gamers: the artificial partition between  ATI’s CrossFireX and Nvidia’s SLI will dissolve with Core i7. Without a Core i7 chipset, Nvidia has said that it will certify motherboards to run SLI; that means you’ll eventually be able to buy one motherboard that can run either CrossFireX or SLI.

For most of us though, Intel’s P35/P45 will be the workhorse. It does best as a single-GPU platform. It can run more than one x16 PCI-E card, but the chipset design prevents it from running both slots at full x16 speeds. That mostly hurts high-resolution gaming, as the bandwidth falls a bit short than two full x16 slots even at PCI-E 2.0 speeds. You may wonder why that matters but the appeal of multi-card solutions is primarily for high-resolution gaming; most of us will sport just one card though.

If we had to choose, the Asus Maximus II Formula performance would be our performance pick. We’re annoyed by the need to activate the X-Fi audio for the onboard sound chip, but at least it has the capability. MSI’s P45 Platinum board would be our budget pick. It’s quite affordable and doesn’t give up much in performance. It does, however, have one ugly-ass heat sink.

Our experience with the MSI  P35 Combo Platinum was an eye opener. Previous dual memory-format motherboards we’ve touched bit us with their generally atrocious performance. The P35 Combo Platinum’s performance was surprisingly good for something that runs either DDR2 or DDR3. Despite this, we’d still recommend that you bypass it: Select either a board that runs DDR2 or one that uses DDR3; trying to straddle the two will only hurt you. The P35 Combo Platinum’s memory flexibility and RAM tweaking just isn’t as strong as boards that only stick with one flavor of RAM. Frankly, the price of DDR3 is low enough today that it shouldn’t kill you to upgrade.

 Best scores are bolded. DNT indicates we did not run a given benchmark on the board indicated. We used a Core 2 Quad Q9300, 2GB of DDR2/1066, a GeForce 8800 GTX, and Windows XP Pro SP2 with each motherboard.