Reading up abit on motherboards.

[Lethul]

And what is you'r opinion? X48 vs p45 ?

Which is better and why? I'm totally clueless when it comes to motherboards but i wanna learn more

 

[Kryten]

The "X" series are usually there for the cutting edge of technology, which usuall sacrifices reliability, and of course there's a large premium in price.
The P45 board is the direct replacement for the very, very popular P35 series, couple of new features and support for more hardware and is looking to perform just as well as just as reliably at a price that isn't going to murder your bank account.
Stick with the P45 certainly, but if you're looking at the moment hold out for a month or so for all the top manufacturers to get their boards out with some mature BIOS revisions.

 

[Bob007]

Also bare in mind crossfire differences, x48's will run both PCIe slots at 16x in crossfire where as the P45 will run them at 8x in crossfire, If you do plan on crossfire setup down the line. X48 is the way to go.

 

[Kryten]

Bob007 : any sources of information on that with benchmarks etc? Not disputing it by any means, just never really looked up the performance levels, would be handy for comparison sake in the future - i.e. how much difference those extra lanes make and if it's worth the extra £100 on average

Had a brief google around and the only information is from other forums, which I normally take with a pinch of salt

 

[TdC]

I currently have the previous incarnation of mobo, but if the P45 is anything like it's daddy I would certainly recommend it, unless you're doing something strange like wanting crossfire etc.

 

[inactionman]

The P45 has PCI-Express 2, so each lane has twice the bandwidth, and at 8 lane's a slot you shouldn't notice the difference, particularly as we aren't hitting the limits yet. Also the number of lanes per slot is switchable, unlike the P35.

I'd get a P45, cheaper, coooler and may overclock better, as they are made on a 65nm process instead of the 90nm process the X38/48 is made on. However the boards are still a bit immature, although I'm keeping my eye on the Asus P5Q-E.

 

[Kryten]

Ditto (on the Asus board).
Also worth noting the P45 has the new ICH10R chip, which I'm hoping is a bit of an improvement on the sometimes flakey performance of ICH9R, especially with RAID. I doubt it, but it does also bring higher FSB performance and native support for 1333mhz FSB.















Christ, it doesn't seem like 2 minutes ago you either ran 33 or 66mhz FSB :/

 

[Bob007]

Intel P45 Vs. X48 Crossfire Performance :: TweakTown

Performance tests by Tweaktown posted yesterday, tbh, looking through em not realy a lot in it.

 

[TdC]

I agree Kryt: having the P35 and thus the ICH9R my raid setup, a mirror, has done exactly one strange thing in the few months of it's existence, which tbh is one thing too many. On the whole I am pleased, but ever since I created the mirror the computer's been slightly out of wack.

 

[Kryten]

Cheers Bob, that shows quite a bit of difference. Looks like it may well still be a force if you're going to make use of crossfire.

 

[dysfunction]

what is this crossfire you are talking about?

 

[TdC]

Ati's version of SLI Dys. Slightly different, but there you go.

 

[Kryten]

Aye, same sort of idea - 2 cards in a system joined with a bridge on top of the card.
It generally performs a tad better than SLI however gets let down by the software, unsuprising from ATI. When it works half sharp (i.e. you're very lucky or using some of the excellent 3rd party drivers such as Omega) it yeilds very good results.

Crossfire is the only dual-card technology available on Intel chipset motherboards with exception of the new and extremely expensive Skulltrail kit.