Friday, March 12, 2010

ASUS Crosshair IV Formula Preview





The ASUS Crosshair IV Formula is a mobo in the Republic of Gamers lineup based on AMD's 890FX chipset, with Native SATA3 support and 32 PCIe lanes. The retail version will probably be in between US $200 and $220, it's going to be available around the time six core Phenom II X6 processors will be launched.




With the black and red colour scheme the Crosshair IV looks great. CPU coolers won't be hinderd by the board's heatsinks, if this unique design helps with actual cooling the VRM and other components remains to be seen.




On the rearpanel there are buttons for RoG Connect(monitoring and real-time overclocking through a secondary computer or laptop connected via USB), a CMOS clear switch and blue USB 3.0 connectors.




Four 16x PCI-E slots will be abled to work in 8x 8x 8x 8x mode with 4 graphics cards using CrossfireX.

On the PCB there's also an auto overclock switch and a 'core unlock' button for automatically unlocking x2 or x3 CPUs.

This is probly the most feature rich AMD motherboards up till now and a much cheaper solution than high-end Intel mainboards.



Read the full preview

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Atom N470





Intel announced a new member of its Pineview generation being the N470, a processor that has the same specs as the N450 but has a higher clock speed of 1.833 GHz instead of 1.67 GHz.




The Thermal Design Power was raised from 5.5 Watts to 6.5 Watts, quite an increase that will probaly have an impact on the battery-life. Atoms are not Dual-Core, but instead have HyperThreading capability that simulates 2 logical cores. The Atom cache size is only 512 KB and the supported memory is DDR2.




New Atoms are also to be announced in the Pine Trail processor lineup, being the N455 and N475, if these CPUs will support DDR3 memory remains to be seen.




Atom N470 Specifications