Intel X48 Motherboards to Show Up This Week

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news: According to industry-tracking website DigiTimes, Intel X48-equipped motherboards will soon be making their way into the retail channel. The first set of shipments are small, but full-throttle shipments should occur in the coming week.

X48 is an evolutionary upgrade over X48, with the prime difference being an upgrade in the systems FSB, which will sit at 1600MHz. Because of this, the upcoming QX9770 processor will be natively supported. That processor is mysterious, because we first previewed it way back in November (http://techgage.com/article/intel_core_2_extreme_qx9770_performance_preview/). It's not often that we release reviews so far in advance of a product launch, so it's looking like the launch could be soon, thanks to the X48 launch.

We've yet to take a look at an X48 board, but have plans to soon. Our first review will be the ASUS P5E3 Premium board, which I expect to be a great performer and feature a splendid bundle (if previous generations are anything to go by). This board is likely to be included in the initial launch as well.

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Although Intel has not yet officially announced its high-end X48 chipset, some first-tier motherboard makers started shipping boards in small volumes a few days ago. Mass shipping will start in the middle of March, according to sources in the channel. Asustek Computer and Gigabyte Technology both started shipping the motherboards this week.

Source: DigiTimes (http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20080313PD212.html)

[sbrehm72255]

Boy I really need to win the lottery if I want to keep up with everything new coming out................;)

As it is I have to make house payments, pay taxes, and eat, so I guess new parts are going to have to take the back seat for a while.

[Rob Williams]

I am surprised X48 has taken THIS long. I expected it to be out in early January, but here it is March and still no sign of it. Given that I've just been sent an X48 board from ASUS, it makes this "rumor" far more of a reality. Normally they won't outright ask to review an early product unless it's release is right around the same time that it will be received.

[Merlin]

Why are they tip-toeing around the DDR2 and DDR3 memory options?
At the last minute the X38 boards were DDR3 and this X48 board is back to DDR2....just wondering WTH is going on.

Merlin

[sbrehm72255]

I think that they both are going to swing both ways.......;)

At least until DDR3 prices come down a little, making them DDR3 only right now would really hurt sales due to high priced DDR3 memory.

[Rob Williams]

X48 was "supposed" to be DDR3-only, but the motherboard manufacturers won't let it happen, and for good reason.

[On_Wisconsin]

The X48 is an evolutionary upgrade over X48? Wow I thought they were the same? :P

[sbrehm72255]

I think that there is a slight typo there.......;)

[Kougar]

Articles I'd read indicated Intel did push back X48's launch because they had to much stock on X38 they wanted to get rid of first.

X48 is X38, the only difference is X48 is the cream of the X38 crop so to speak. They are the highest speed binned X38's.

Intel designed X38 to be DDR3 oriented, but due to DDR3 pricing reasons and general user complaints the actual mainboard companies went against the flow and decided to release either DDR2, DDR2/3 combo boards, or just like Gigabyte make everyone happy by releasing the exact same board for each memory flavor. Gigabyte has sold/will sell DDR2 only and DDR3 only boards for P35, X38, and soon to be X48.

[sbrehm72255]

I think that most vendors are going to be doing the same thing, selling both types...............;)

[CoolZone]

DDR2 support is very good for people that want to buy a lot of ram,very cheap and for people that have already bought the ram and waiting for a new,better motherboard to come for sale.
The thing is I read somewbere that the starting price for X48 motherboards is 450$.Is that true?Also,ICH10 was promised,and I do not know for sure what motherboards include it.
Does anyone know from the launched X48 mobos which have digital PWM?I heard the DFI one has

[werty316]

/me like however the chances of one getting in my hands is slim :(

[Kougar]

No, that is not true... that costs almost as much as a Skulltrail motherboard... ;)

X48 will range between $200-$300, most of them falling inside the latter half of that range.

[sbrehm72255]

Way to much cash IMHO.........;)

And besides that, I have no use for most of the feature set, they will end up being turned off in the bios.

But I do like the OC'ing ability of the boards.

[Rob Williams]

I just want a board that can hit 500FSB reliably. It's amazing to me that I've been unable to get a board that can hit 500FSB... it makes benchmarking DDR3 useless (since DDR3-2000 can't be hit).

X48 is a minor upgrade and chances are for most, no real difference will be seen. Even some P35 boards are advertised to support 1600FSB, so like Kougar said, X48 should prove to be the highest binned parts that should be superb for overclocking.

[Kougar]

Rob, your statement truly does puzzle me... May I ask what boards have you attempted specifically? Are you sure your processor sample is capable of running 500FSB, or have you tried multiple processors?

I've taken a E6300 to ~515FSB on a GA-965P-DS3 Rev 1 (Rev 1s had serious vReg issues), and the same procy hit ~540FSB on my GA-P35-DQ6 Rev 1. 24 hour stable, the works, no extreme voltages I wouldn't be comfortable running 24/7. Those were the only two boards that I've bought since the P4 Northwood days...

My only other motherboard experience has been a Foxconn 975X based board I was able to test out, it easily couldn't make it it but that should be expected. It was capable of hitting somewhere around 450 though nonetheless... any board whatsoever should do 1600FSB.

[Rob Williams]

I used to hit 500FSB on older motherboards, like the GA-965P-DS3 just fine, but since then, it seems to be impossible. I think it comes down to bad luck, because I see other reviews of boards I have here that do hit over 500FSB, but I've never been able to hit it stable.

I've tired numerous CPUs, from the E6750 to the QX9650, and no cigar. I have a Striker II Formula that I'll install tonight and see where I get with that. An ASUS P5E3 Premium (X48) is also en route, so hopefully that has some breathing room. Most motherboards I've touched lately have topped out at 475FSB, so maybe I do have an incredibly bad batch of CPUs.

[THUMPer]

My buddy just got an X38 with DDR2. He is thoroughly confused on setting up the BIOS. I will need to help him. He is an old AMD guy.

Plus Nehalem supports DDR3 only.

[Rob Williams]

Yes, Nehalem will be when the push for DDR3 really begins.

[sbrehm72255]

Can't wait for the prices of DDR3 to drop a bit more, although they have dropped a fair amount in the past few months.

[Kougar]

It's kinda ironic... memory prices for a 2GB DDR2-800 kit at the start of 2007 are the same as some good 2GB DDR3-1600 kits right now.

The irony is that at the time $200 was considered a good price for 2GB DDR2 last year. ;)

[sbrehm72255]

Yup, times are a changing, I was one of the big holdouts in switching over to DDR2 from the old DDR (mainly due to running AMD A64 X2's).

I only switched over because of the Intel C2D's and now I'm up running DDR3 (low end stuff) early.

[Rob Williams]

I was pondering about the the other night... I was thinking back to just two years ago when I was having a blast overclocking the Corsair 2GB 3500LL-PRO kit... amazed to high-hell that I could reach a stable OC of DDR-540 with 3-3-2-0 timings...

It felt like less than a month later, DDR2 was scattered all about here. The transition was SO fast, it was incredible. Though even at that time, DDR2 was around, but everyone had AMD... I jumped on the DDR2 bandwagon a little earlier than most only because I knew there would be demand, and demand, there certainly was.

Now we are dealing with DDR3, and I have to say, it bores the hell out of me. I just don't find overclocking DDR3 to be as fun or interesting as I did both DDR/DDR2... I am not sure why. Perhaps a part of it is that we saw DDR3-2000 overclocks AT LAUNCH, or it could be that technology is just moving so fast, it's hard to enjoy focusing on one architecture for too long.

Before we know it, DDR4 will be here.

[Kougar]

Well, it would help if DDR3 showed some appreciabe gains in everyday applications, instead of narrow situations or specfic benchmarks. DDR2 had an easier time of doing that once it began reaching 800Mhz with around CAS 4 latencies... DDR3 even at 2GHz just doesn't do much.

I am rather curious how Nehalem will change this though, removing the FSB latency, integrating the memory controller directly... I am betting it will to some degree. Just how much I wish I knew! :D

Speaking of DDR4, you did hear that ATI was playing around with Samsung GDDR5 right? Plain nuts... :)

[sbrehm72255]

GDR5 is on its way (maybe, depending on price I'd bet)

I'm willing to bet that the onboard controller is going to make a big differance, sort of what was/is going on between AMD and Intel systems running DDR, AMD always won the bandwidth race with their onboard controllers.

[Rob Williams]

Both GDDR5 and DDR4 are en route, but not necessarily right away. I know that JEDEC was in close contact with memory manufacturers regarding DDR4 last spring... before DDR3's launch. Talks and development will go on for quite a while before something gets pushed out.

New memory types are always expensive as hell (obviously), so I don't think we'll see GDDR5 that soon.

AMD always won the bandwidth race with their onboard controllers.

Yup, and with Intel's QuickPath Interconnect and the three-channel memory configurations, bandwidth and latencies should be the best we've ever seen.

[sbrehm72255]

Yup, and with Intel's QuickPath Interconnect and the three-channel memory configurations, bandwidth and latencies should be the best we've ever seen.

That's exactly what I'm thinking and hoping for anyways,,,,,,,,,,,,:D

It's going to put all that more pressure on AMD to pull their heads out and do something fantastic.

I know that this info is from the Inquire, but it's still good info none the less..................;)

Analysis Nehalem's happy memories: record DRAM bandwidth

Supported speeds
Officially, at this moment, Bloomfield and Gainestown will support up to DDR3-1333 memory speed in both standard and registered varieties (servers only for the latter), both ECC and non-ECC. Does this sound sluggish, knowing that this CeBIT saw OCZ, Corsair, Kingston and others show DDR3-2133 memories, running at CL9 no less, on Nforce 790i?

Not really - the first DDR3-1333 CL5 ultra low-latency parts are out, some of them in 2 GB density per DIMM module. On the desktop Bloomfield, with three channels and two DIMMs per channel, this gives you a comfortable - even for Vista bloatware - 12 GB RAM. The bandwidth? A whopping 32 GB/s total peak memory bandwidth across all channels, same as dual-channel DDR3-2000.

Furthermore, there is no FSB bottleneck that lets current Penryns access only half of that huge dual-channel DDR3 - the three channels in Nehalem are, through the on-board memory controller, accessed directly by the CPU's L3 cache. Even if Intel just bolted on a 3-channel version of X48 chipset's DDR3 controller, and removed the FSB blockage, you'd still be able to get at least 25 GB/s Sandra memory bandwidth scored with such DDR3-1333 memory configuration.

What about the dual socket part, the one to power the Skulltrail successor? Well, Intel's slides show it having slightly over four times the bandwidth of the best current dual-socket Harpertown with four FBD-800 channels. Knowing we easily get 9 GB/s there, we're talking about a 36 GB/s dual-socket workstation Sandra memory bandwidth score - a massive leap of nearly three times over the best AMD systems too.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/03/20/analysis-nehalems-happy

[Kougar]

Nice link Bio, I had missed that article!

With that much bandwidth, my theory about Nehalem being more sensitive than Penryn to memory speeds might be wrong. It sounds almost like Nehalem will have so much bandwidth with its direct low latency triple pipe to the memory that faster memory would be superfluous. I still bet that low latency RAM will show some nice improvements though!

Does anyone remember what ultra low CAS latency it was that AMD's chips couldn't make use of? Do they even still have any ultra low CAS limitations? Have to briefly wonder if Nehalem might share a similar issue.

[Rob Williams]

It was AM2 that had the limitation... none of the chipsets would allow a CAS latency of 2. However, many people were overclocking their modules so high that CAS2 wouldn't have been possible anyway, so I didn't see a huge issue there.

As for that Inquirer article... I had no idea DDR3-1333 C5 modules were available... that is damn sweet. I need to get back in the loop.

[sbrehm72255]

I don't remember seeing 1333 at C5 either, but I'm currently running my Kingston at C6 which isn't to bad, but with the funky deviders on my MSI board its running slightly under 1333 as well, but close enough I guess.

Kingston stuff one step better than what I have.

http://www.valueram.com/datasheets/KHX11000D3UL_1G.pdf

[Rob Williams]

I find it interesting that the kit there runs at DDR3-1375 with CL5... but requires tRC of 7. With DDR2... I found the CAS latency to be far more finicky than the tRC.

I am impressed that CL5 kits are available regardless though... I am really out of the loop. I should get a bunch of these kits in and see how they perform to the first-gen.

[sbrehm72255]

A nice little DDR3 round-up would be a good thing (1333) because prices are coming down alot.