Chipzilla releases little motherboards
Essential, classic and extreme
MAKER OF CHIPS INTEL has formally released three new ‘small form’ motherboards for the great unwashed to play around with.
In Intel style, the motherboards have been stripped of names that might be interesting and identifiable and replaced with instantly forgettable numbers.
The boards are the DX48BT2 Extreme Series which had the codename Bone Trail 2; the Eva Cove board has become the DG35EC Classic Series; and Little Falls now sports the catchy title Desktop Board D945GCLF Essential Series.
As the names sort of suggest, the Extreme is targeted at gamers, the Classic is for mainstream multimedia users and the Essential is for entry level users. Intel says the Essential series is aimed at OEMs looking to build a complete system at a sub-$300 price point. The D945GCLF is designed for Atom CPUs.
The Desktop Board DX48BT2 has a 1600MHz front-side bus and memory support and can be clocked to the nines. It is designed for Intel Core 2 Extreme processors featuring quad or dual-core processing.
The Classic is is based on GMA X3500 integrated graphics, and supports Intel Core 2 Quad and Intel Core 2 Duo processors. It is the first Intel Motherboard to have integrated DirectX10 capability and support for OpenGL 2.0.
Intel started releasing the boards around the world a couple of days ago. µ
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Comments
It's a feature, not a bug
There is good reason Intel chooses unmemorable strings as names for its motherboards, you know. The only motherboard they marketed in recent history with a memorable name, as far as I can remember, was the 865PERL. What that board is most remembered for in the local market is CPU VRM capacitors that exploded about 13 months after deployment. Typical local market warranty is 12 months, btw.