ReviewsGigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6
Posted 08/15/08 at 11:00:00 AM by Gordon Mah Ung
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.
Elsewhere, the board is typical Gigabyte; it includes surface-mounted buttons and the most clearly marked USB and FireWire ports we’ve ever seen. So if you nuke your USB drive because you plugged the USB connector into a FireWire header, it’s your own fault, brother.
Hit the jump for the rest of the review
ReviewsMSI P45 Platinum
Posted 08/08/08 at 01:58:07 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
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.
Hit the jump to read the full story.
ReviewsMSI P35 Combo Platinum
Posted 07/10/08 at 08:07:56 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
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.
Hit the jump to read our review of this dual-format monster.
ReviewsMSI K9A2 Platinum
Posted 06/26/08 at 06:08:47 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
If you want AMD performance without the cost, MSI’s K9A2 Platinum might be the ticket. It’s a bare-bones yet performance-oriented board for Phenom procs that boasts no fewer than four x16 physical PCI-E 2.0 slots, as well as support for eSATA and SAS drives and loads more features than you'd expect from a board of this price.
Hit the jump for the full review!
ReviewsAsus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Wi-Fi
Posted 06/26/08 at 05:33:24 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
Out of sight and out of mind usually means no one even knows–or cares–that you're alive. That’s the problem AMD’s chipset division has faced lately.
With Nvidia still ruling the roost in Phenom and Athlon 64 chipsets, AMD’s chipset division doesn’t get much press for its new chipsets. Here’s a news flash though, some pretty compelling motherboards are using the new 790FX chipset.
Asus's M3A32-MVP Deluxe is one of them. One of the first boards to support AMD’s Phenom, the M3A32-MVP is pretty much the reference board as far as Phenoms go.
Hit the jump for a full review!
ReviewsIntel DX48BT2 
Posted 06/25/08 at 06:49:55 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
Maybe Intel should give up on making performance motherboards. You’d think an Intel chipset would stand the best chance in a board designed by Intel. That’s not the case. The desktop partner to Intel’s crazy-ass Skulltrail platform, the DX48BT2 board is code-named Bonetrail, and of the four boards here, it is the most disappointing.
ReviewsAsus Striker II Extreme 
Posted 06/25/08 at 05:49:55 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
If the EVGA nForce 790i board is a Shelby Cobra—a bristling big-block V8 with drum brakes and leaf springs—Asus’s Striker II Extreme is a high-tech, twin-turbo, all-wheel-steering Nissan Skyline GT-R R35. In other words, the Striker II Extreme is a spectacle of bells, whistles, and doohickeys. So much so that you actually won’t mind shelling out $450 for it. Read on to find what your dough'll getcha.
ReviewsEVGA eForce 790i Ultra
Posted 06/25/08 at 05:19:07 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
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. Read on for the full review!
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