Holiday Motherboard Guide

High-End Intel Motherboards

AMD really can't compete at the upper echelon of performance, so when we move into the high-end range we currently only have Intel recommendations. To further complicate matters, we have two platforms that we need to address: the old guard Core 2 boards, and the shiny new X58 offerings. It is hard to justify the high-end Core 2 options with the recent introduction of the i7 and X58 products, but if you have already invested in a Core 2 processor and DDR2 these boards still make sense. Any of these boards provide excellent performance and some recent price drops have made a couple of boards more interesting than the mid-range selections.

Core 2

Now priced at $170, the X48 based DFI DK X48-T2RS is great "bargain" at the upper end of the S775 market. This board offers an excellent feature set, great overclocking performance, and is just an extremely stable platform to utilize for a gaming rig or personal workstation.

At the other end of the X48 spectrum is the ASUS Rampage Formula board based on the X48 and ICH9R chipsets. The feature set is almost endless and the board is extremely solid and overclocks like a cheetah on steroids. This is one of the best boards we have utilized in a long time and if it were not for the i7/X58, it would be at the top of our list.

Honorable mention goes to the ASRock X48TurboTwins-WiFi for a unique combination of features, performance, and price in an X48 platform. Foxconn contacted us today and told us they are running a web special on their X48 based BlackOps board that received an Editors Choice award from us earlier this year. The price has been reduced to $229.99 and an additional $60 rebate is available bringing the price down to$169.99. This board is for the tweaker at heart (we mean tweakers) and based on the price reduction we recommend it.

Core i7/X58

We recently reviewed several X58 boards and still have a few additional boards to report on. We are working on a separate i7/X58 performance guide, but in the meantime we recommend the ASUS P6T-Deluxe, Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, and after a BIOS update this weekend, the EVGA X58 SLI. The Biostar TPower X58 looks like a winner in early testing and we think the DFI X58 and Foxconn Bloodrage boards will appeal to the upper-end enthusiasts.

Wrap-Up

That takes care of our motherboard recommendations for the time being… ah, but what should you then install in your bare motherboard? Stay tuned for additional coverage this week of various computing components and peripherals. In fact, we have a memory gala planned for tomorrow.