Abit ATI 690 Intel board pictured

The Fatality F-I90HD is an interesting one, aimed of course at the gaming market. This board is based on the AMD RS600 chipset, the first one to come out since the DFI board. It will be interesting to see how this one fares after a longer gestation period.

The board has HDMI, 10 USB ports, and a bunch of other higher end features including 7.1 sound. Not much is missing, and it will do full rez HD movies with DRM! The chipset is overclocked from the factory, so it should be faster than a vanilla RS600 part if there is one.

Next up we have the IP35 series of boards. In case you haven't been paying attention, this one is based on the upcoming Intel P35 chipset, their top of the line part until they announce the X38. They all support CoreNumberNumeral and CoreNumberNumeralDoubleTheNumeral parts, have 7.1 sound and a 1333FSB.

The differences between the various parts are subtle but important. The big dog is the IP35Pro, and the first thing you will notice is dual 16x PCIe, 2 GigE, 2 1394 ports and 12 USB2.0 ports. It also has the µGuru chips.

The first step down is the IP35ss (sans suffix). It loses a 16x slot, one GigE port and in general use components that are a notch down. The lowest rung on the IP35 ladder is the IP35-E. This one is basically the same as the IP35 but without the 1394 ports.

It is a solid line up and the P35 looks like a good high end of mainstream part. Abit is putting out a slew of options around them and an almost unique ATI RS600 for AMD part. Definitely worth a look.

If you don't think the standard P35 parts are interesting, check out this heatsink on it, one of the more interesting ones at the show. The half round fan looks quite nice in person. µ