Intel X58 Smackover - DX58SO @ Bjorn3D

[JackW]

For the last six months or so, we all have been awaiting the arrival of a highly anticipated motherboard from Intel. We've all heard the rumors and we've seen all the sneek peeks, but it just wasn't enough for us. We wanted MORE. I bring you one of those most highly anticipated products from Intel, the Smackover motherboard. This motherboard is being armed with Intel's latest chipset, the X58 northbridge, and it was paired up with an already proven southbridge, the ICH10R. The X58 northbridge chipset has the capability of cross platforming GPU's from ATI's Crossfire to NVIDIA's SLi all on the same board. Fully supporting tri-channel DDR3 memory, using three sticks of memory instead of two sticks of memory, for even more memory bandwidth. The X58 chipset, supports up to 36 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes, so it is possible to have two PCIe x16 slots and one PCIe x4 slot on the same motherboard.

The performance of the Smackover motherboard is simply put, 'Mind Blowing'. Overclocking the Core i7 CPU with this motherboard is very easy compared to the Core 2 CPU's. I better get on with the review before I get too carried away. I know, too late.

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