Posted 08/06/08 at 11:07:36 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

It’s the worst kept secret in the industry: Intel’s next-generation Penryn killer, codenamed Nehalem is just around the corner. We’ve been seeing leaked benchmarks based on early silicon for months, and Nehalem’s Wikipedia page is already packed with unconfirmed specifications. All indications – and this is with more optimizations to come, mind you – is that Nehalem may be a bad mother worthy of having Isaac Hayes pound out a theme song for it.

OK, we get it. It’s going to be fast, but just how difficult is it to build a Nehalem rig? What are the catches? Will the new motherboard and socket require some silly new BTX form factor? To find out, we convinced one of our hardware contacts (who’ll remain unnamed) to let us into its lab so we could finally get our hands on the new chip. There, we were provided with the desktop version of Nehalem – called Bloomfield – and an Intel D58XSO “Smackover” board.

 Read on to see how we built the Nehalem rig, and what surprises we encountered along the way!

Read More

Posted 06/24/08 at 12:51:13 PM by Paul Lilly

Playing the waiting game often means your proposed upgrade stays stuck in a perpetual limbo, except for those rare times when the next best thing truly is right around the corner. It appears we've reached one of those junctures, and a trifecta of new Nehalem procs already have one foot nudged out the door and ready to run. Keep reading to find out what Intel has planned, and when.

Read More