Gigabyte is pretty much the first to announce the use of Nvidia's new chipset featuring onboard video graphics. Gigabyte has been making great boards lately and their new C51 offering looks mighty promising.
Nvidia's SLI performance can be beneficial depending on your system setup. If you are running two low end video cards, there will definitely be a performance boost.
DFI has certainly made quite a big bang in the AMD world with their LANParty motherboards. The fact that I still own the LANParty UT nF4 Ultra-D is one big surprise. I never keep hardware for more than 2 months.
Abit's release of the Fatal1ty line started out pretty well. It overclocked to great speeds and was stacked with cool features. The only thing bad about the Fatal1ty AN8 was the lack of VDIMM options.
Over the past few years, ECS has built up a reputation of producing extremely affordable motherboards. In all of my years of experience, ECS motherboards have been quite adequate for basic computing use.
We all know that Abit has been fairly quiet over the past couple of years. When they finally introduced some new toys, they walked in with plenty of ammo to challenge everyone in the motherboard field.
There is nothing really exciting about the release of the Intel 955X chipset. The two key points behind the new release are the support for Intel's dual core processors and the ability to run a 1:2 memory divider.
We all know that Nvidia is slowing taking over the chipset category for AMD platforms. The single MCP solution provides great performance and extremely high overclocking headroom. What about the Intel side?
When we had our look at the Abit Fatal1ty AN8, we were quite pleased with the great performance, overclocking headroom, and the general physical layout of the motherboard.
A little while back we reviewed DFI's LANParty UT nF3 250Gb motherboard. While it proved to be the best overclocking motherboard available and provided great memory adjustments, the performance itself was lacking.
Abit is a company that enthusiasts should definitely recognize. Abit has been known for their excellent overclocking motherboards since the ancient days of Pentium IIs and Celerons.
