Buy an Intel Bearlake DDR3 board today

ALTERNATE.DE, A LEADING GERMAN ON-LINE shop, Alernate.de jumped the gun by a bit and offered motherboard based on Intel's upcoming Bearlake chipset. Its price is set at pretty steep 244 Euro, ($331).

The honour of being the first Bearlake board you can buy went to Asustek Computer Co., Ltd. - for its P5K3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP. This board packs Intel P35 Northbridge with ICH9R Southbridge chips, two GbE chips (Marvell uses integrated PCIe x1 while Realtek relies on good old PCI connection), ADI 1988B sound chip supports 7.1 channel audio.

The board also sports Wifi in the form of embedded miniPCI card that sits between the classic ATX connector bracket and first PCIe x1 slot. This is not just a WiFi card, this 802.11a/b/g part can switch into a router mode, and your computer easily becomes a network server (2GbE connections + WiFi), doable if this computer will not be thirsty of system memory and feature a powerful CPU.

After Striker, ASUS is keeping its heatpipe design, albeit in a bit modified form

Hardware-wise, it supports from FSB clocks from 800-1333 MHz, 4 DIMMs provide support for up to 8GB of DDR3 memory. This board will also support upcoming 45nm Penryn CPUs. When it comes to multi-GPU support, Nvidia will deny the possibility of having two GeForce boards running in SLI - AMD on the other hand, did support Crossfire on Intel's chipsets as 975X. So, you just might opt for two Radeon HD2900XTs as well.

In that case, you will be reduced to two PCIe x1 and theoretical usage of one PCI slot, since this board comes in known x1/x1/x16/PCI/x16/PCI configuration. Using a 2-slot cooling will render PCI part of equation useless, and Ageia and BigFoot Networks just might ditch PCI as well, and offer Physx and Killer NIC parts on PCIe interface. µ

L'INQs
Web-site with details...244 Euro for each piece.
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