Gigabyte and MSI Announce X48 Boards, But Not Launch

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
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From our front-page news:
When will we see Intel X48? That is the question, and a good one. At this point, I am not sure when the market penetration will begin, but it should be within the next two - three weeks, but that's a hunch. I'll be receiving the Gigabyte board (pictured) shortly, so I assume that the launch is not too far off. According to industry tracking site DigiTimes, both Gigabyte and MSI have announced their new motherboards, but neither are prepared to deliver them, at least not immediately.

I am unsure where ASUS is with their X48 samples, but I believe their boards are going to be delayed by an additional week, similar to the X38 launch. Why this is, I believe is linked to the fact that they want to put in a little extra time, since their launch boards tend to be very feature-rich. Gigabyte's launch X48 board should be interesting as well though, as they include their new Dynamic Energy Saver technology that does as you'd expect. Every little bit helps when you have 200W GPUs, I suppose.
You can expect our X48 coverage in the weeks to come, as samples are brought in.

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Gigabyte Technology recently announced its X48 motherboard highlighting it will adopt the company's unique Dynamic Energy Saver (DES) technology, while Micro-Star International (MSI) also made the announcement that its X48 motherboard will adopt the same dual-channel power supply design as that in its X38 model for better power management. MSI's board will also feature an updated Circu-Pipe fansink and MSI SkyTel technology.

Source: DigiTimes
 

sbrehm72255

Tech Monkey
The MSI X48 board has been listed on their site for sometime now, I just don't have a clue as to when they will hitthe streets with them. As a matter of fact, MSI lists to different versions of their board already, one with DDR3 only and the other that can run DDR2 "OR" DDR3.

http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=prodpage2&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=170

http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=proddesc&prod_no=1392&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=170

http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=proddesc&prod_no=1393&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=170
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
I'd like to know how the DDR2 functionality is being added on those boards, since the X48 chipset is supposed to support DDR3 only. Those boards look great though. We need to review one of their boards sometime...
 

sbrehm72255

Tech Monkey
One of my last boards was a MSI P6N SLI with only a 650I chipset and it performed and clocked better than my current XFX 680I LT board. I have nothing but good things to say about MSI boards right now...............;)

My MSI P35 Platinum Combo board just showed up today and it's able to run both types of memory (DDR2 & DDR3) as well via 2 strange little plugin memory slot cards, maybe the X48 boards use the same method, I don't know.
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
My MSI P35 Platinum Combo board just showed up today and it's able to run both types of memory (DDR2 & DDR3) as well via 2 strange little plugin memory slot cards, maybe the X48 boards use the same method, I don't know.

Well, the P35/X38 chipsets do natively support both DDR2 and DDR3, as opposed to X48 which focuses on DDR3 only. The X48 chipset is designed strictly for enthusiasts, as the native DDR3-1600 label would suggest, so for DDR2 to be supported, I'd imagine that another chip would have to be added to handle it. That in itself would be strange though...

I need to e-mail one of these companies and figure it out.
 
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