And the mainboard final players are...

ASUS AND GIGABYTE are now the firm leaders in branded mainboards in both product performance and sales volumes. MSI, DFI, EVGA, Biostar, ECS and such, including Intel's own desktop group, are more or less reduced to second league status market share wise and will have to compete on quality or price. Some of the old favourites like Abit are now, well, history, and Foxconn's Quantum Force mobo brand is slated for the same fate as the giant group refocuses on OEM deals.

So what will be the future of this battle? Look at the products in the focus of competition. Asus and Gigabyte will of course continue to fight it out at the very high end: the almost even X58 Core i7 mobo duel between the Asus Rampage II Extreme and Gigabyte EX58-Extreme is now tipped slightly in Gigabyte's favour as it has announced the EX58A-Extreme with 24-phase power versus the Rampage II's 18-phase spec, while Asus has added external OC Station support for its boards.

With the new Core i7 975, I had a chance to compare the two mainboards. Gigabyte's EX58 Extreme with its humongous extra chipset heatsink module - the thing is so big it needs its own PCI slot mounting bracket space - does win by 3 to 4 deg C when it comes to the North Bridge temperature. Even more gain could be there if you use its built-in watercooling block, I guess. As for overclocking, both can do 4.27GHz quad core, multiplier 32, without problems using auto settings, but not more than that.

Both vendors have basically overbuilt in component quality - Japanese solid caps and such - and, with both these boards in the $400 range, it is no wonder.

The BIOS options in these boards could fill in a 50-page manual on their own now. So, rather than fiddling with zillions of options, overclocking guides by the vendors will, in my opinion, have to be a mandatory part of the supplied literature on high end mobos.

And, both vendors extended that over-engineering into the midrange mobo market too. The Asus P5Q Pro Turbo and Gigabyte GA-EG45M have most of the same componentry and design tweaks as their bigger brethren.

On the P5Q Pro Turbo, I had an easy time getting it up to FSB2133 on a quad-core E-stepping Core 2 Quad, while the GA-EG45M held a record of its own for me, with FSB1900 on the same CPU using integrated graphics!

In summary, the mainboard battle's benefits for users and integrators are high quality design, features and components across a wider range of mobo prices. Even a $1K system can now be an overclocking marvel. A few short years ago, this was unseen in the midrange desktop space.

However, with the overwhelming negotiating and marketing, not to forget brand, strength of the big players, what's in for the rest? Some of the smaller board vendors, like EVGA and DFI, did manage to carve a nice niche for themselves in high-end segment too, since that area was left open by the departure of Abit and Quantum Force, as well as the soon to be expected MSI de-emphasis of its mobo business. For EVGA, the situation is a bit easier since it is also strong in the graphics card business and can use that to bundle kits together. So, I expect these two smaller vendors to do well in their mobo niches, besides Asus and Gigabyte, which are now undisputably the two big players here. µ