Asus X48 board trumps all

IT'S BEEN A LONG trek for Intel from their “Overclocking Verboten” days. Today Intel has seen the light (thanks to AMD, to some degree) and churns out really hot enthusiast pieces like the X48 chipset. Morry and Kyle from [H]ardOCP have been fooling around with a hot-off-the-production-line Asus P5E3 Premium. They think there’s nothing quite like it, for all the right reasons. If you want the highest performing motherboard that’s undertaken [H]’s bench tests... this is it. Oh, hope you’ve been saving up some money...

Aftermarket CPU coolers are a dime a dozen these days. So Dragon Steel Mods went off and got a dozen to review. They’ve got an intelligent, albeit unusual, approach to the testing: they plugged the fans in two different ways (to the board header and to the molex) and measured the results. Naturally, once they’re plugged into the molex connector they’re as dumb as they get, buzzing away at 100% of their RPMs. With the header, the mobo takes control of monitoring and adjusting RPM’s... so please spin this way.

Georgie boy, from Hillbilly Hardware, got an MSI K9A2 Platinum shipped over. This is essentially the base to build on for a Spider platform. G plugged a X2 6400+ into the board and let ‘er rip. He thinks it’s a great upgraders board and performance is already great under an X2 – so he yearns for better results when AMD sorts out its buggy Phenom. Click hither.

Extreme Tech has come up with an article on HD 3870 overclocking. Their premise is: if there’s value in the beast, then overclocking might add some more. Well, they took on a Spider platform with the HD 3870, cranked up the MHz and ... well... let’s just say you’ll have to see it to believe it. Not what you think!

Tweakers at TweakPC.de have received a shiny aluminium case with a nice little surprise in it. Sapphire has sent them something special – an ATOMIC HD 3870. This card is something of a treat for enthusiasts as it sports a unique vapour-chamber cooling system in a single slot configuration, meaning you get powerful cooling with a lot of headroom to slot in a second, third or – who knows – a fourth card. Their interactive charts are also quite useful. Read it here (English here).

A last note, we noticed in our feed reader that XBit Labs lists a review on Intel’s Enthusiast board, the DX38BT – but it’s MIA. We have one sitting at our workstation just begging for a go. Well, us or them, we’ll get you a review soon... µ