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Intel Z68 Motherboard Round-Up
AmyVernon writes "Until Intel's next-gen, high-end Sandy Bridge-E processor is released sometime this quarter, Intel's second generation Core family of processors and the Z68 Express chipset are Intel's current premiere desktop platform for the mainstream. This look at several different motherboard offerings from manufacturers that cover a range of form factors, feature sets, and price points. Asus, MSI, ASRock, Gigabyte, eVGA and Zotac are all represented here. In addition to support for the entire line of 2nd-gen Intel Core chips with Turbo Boost 2.0, the Z68 chipset supports Intel High Definition Audio, 8 PCI-Express 2.0 lanes (16 more in the CPU), 6 SATA ports (2 x 6Gbps, 4 x 3Gbps), integrated Gigabit Ethernet, 14 USB ports, and a smattering of A/v ports including HDMI and DisplayPort."
Seriously. There are dozens of hardware reviews like this one daily. In what way was this one special enough to make the front page? I'm not seeing it.
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This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Am I the only one disappointed that this revision doesn't support the Thunderbolt port? Even if few motherboards would ship with it at least the chipset should have the support.
The only thing hold back desktop boards right now is more RAM slots. I would really like to see motherboards with 8 or event 16 RAM slots become standard. Most of these motherboards support 16 GB maximum memory, which is nice, but once you start running VMs or databases on your machine, 16 GB can get eaten up pretty quickly. I would think that having a machine with a possible 64 GB of RAM would entice a lot of people. Right now the only way to get serious amounts of RAM is to go with XEON or Opteron. And those chips are pretty expensive without offering a whole lot of extra, or event less computing power (assuming single socket).
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As it does not have on board video and there are no plans for data only cards.
So does intel have a plan for linking Thunderbolt to a add in ATI / AMD and nvidia cards?
I'm an old hardware hacker and it JUST SEEMS WRONG that Intel is using the number 68. That is for Motorola, 65 is for MOS and Rockwell. 80 is for Intel.
It's WRONG I say, WRONG!
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Not quite. There are two changes Microsoft made. One is that Windows 8 supports the feature, which on-one really cares about. The other is that they require OEMs to now support that feature, and to have it enabled by default. That is what people are concerned about. Yes, it's up to the OEM if they want to lock their hardware to make it impossible to run any non-Microsoft OS or if they would like to include a setup option to disable secure boot... there is nothing preventing them including that option, but there is nothing requiring they support it either. It's one more way in which OEMs could screw their users, even if only by simply not careing enough about non-Windows users to get someone to spend ten minutes writing the code.
Is this anything like the kick-ass Motorola Z80?
wait for the X86-64 boards
now with more RAM
Which is non-issue for those who build their own. And in this case since this is a motherboard comparison, those who would be buying these motherboards would be building their own so non-issue.
It just means the re-sell value of a computer with that feature enforced will be pretty much just what you can get for the individual components.
www.discountelectronics.com has probably the most to loose from secure boot.
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Cpu to SB link, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0, Thunderbolt controller. Also 32 is 2 X16 slots and 8 at pci-e 3.0 seems good for chip set link + maybe a x4 slot.
But x4 at 2.0 limits the chipset link even more so if usb 3.0 and sata 6.0 are part of the chipset.
I confess to not having read TFA but I guess the summary would have mentioned it given the world-class editing team around here... *cough!*
Anyway, being Thunderbolt an intel technology, is there any such controller/port available in these boards?
As that maybe a hold up to having Thunderbolt with pci-e video cards and why there are no Thunderbolt data only pci-e cards. Also may be why there is no new mac pro yet as well.
when they are on the same bus.
The non high end intel boards have a hard time fitting in 1 video card + sata 6 + usb 3.0 as they need a switch on the x16 2.0 link or they need to cut down video to x8.
The DIM bus (pci-e 2.0 x4) can't really fit in gig-e, usb 3, sata 6, other x1 slots as well.
Now let's take x16 pci-e 3.0 and switch that to 2 x16 2.0 slots and then you have the lanes you need but the switches add cost and board space.
So in your case take 1 video card on x16 and to be safe say all on board stuff needs 4-8 lanes. So then you have 20-24 left over now thunderbolt may need 4-8 pci-e lanes so now at 12-16 left. Ok other pci-e cards that you may want cable card tuner x4 raid card / SSD pci-e cards x4-x8/ sound x1 / firewire x1.
I'm not saying more lanes isn't nice, or useful. I was specifically responding to but just shy of the magical 48 you'd need for 3x fully populated pci express x16 slots. Giving each of the physical x16 slots an electrical x8 connection is not going to hamper any existing peripheral that I am aware of. With the doubling of per lane bandwidth from PCIe 1 to PCIe 2 the need for an electrical x16 slot was basically eliminated. (if it was ever needed in the first place, was there ever a device that needed more than 2GB/s that was fitted with a PCIe 1.x chipset?)
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Tigerdirect has Kingston 8GB PC3-8500 for $125.
Sounds like a driver issue. I would be more interested in how it works with linux.