Computex 2010: Motherboards
by Ian Cutress on June 16, 2010 12:36 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
- AMD
- Intel
- Motherboards
MSI P55A Fuzion
Lucid have been quite insistent on pushing their Hydra GPU Load Balancer chip onto MSI for a product to sell. Despite the nature of the drivers and lack of supported video game titles, MSI are releasing the P55A Fuzion, with an onboard Lucid Hydra chip, at some point this July we believe.
With a predicted price of $159, the Fuzion is essentially the little brother to the Big Bang Fuzion, but with USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s. Against other P55 boards of similar price, this puts the P55A Fuzion in direct competition with the ASUS P7P55D-E and the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3P. However, this does make it the cheapest Lucid Hydra enabled motherboard on the market, should you wish to take the plunge.
ECS P55H-AK
ECS are desperately trying to break into consumer markets, so we were set upon with their new P55 board. As part of the ECS Black series, the PCB comes in pure black and white, and offers three PCIe x16 Gen 2.0 slots spaced for tri-GPU setups, 4 USB 3.0 slots, 2 SATA/eSATA 6Gb/s ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and 7.1 channel HD audio. Extra PCIe lanes come in the form of a PLX chip, located between the first and second PCIe slots.
What is most unusual about his motherboard is a 4-pin molex connector situated beside the DDR3 slots. Depending on the purpose of this molex connector (it seems in a weird position to provide extra power to the GPU layout or the CPU) this may or may not inconvenience users, depending on case and cable management.
Biostar TH55XE
The TH55XE from Biostar is an oddly coloured H55 micro-ATX board also on display at Computex. Using a black PCB with orange, white, and yellow components, this is board aimed at the HTPC market.
With support for Core i3/i5/i7 processors, 4 DDR3 DIMM slots and Realtek ALC888 8+2 Channel HD Audio, Biostar believe the motherboard could make a perfect combination for an in-home entertainment system. However, as seems to be the case constantly with Biostar, the combination of PCI and PCIe slots may not be to anyone’s taste. The PCIe x16, PCIe x1, PCI, PCI arrangement will frustrate users wanting an x1 audio card and a double slot or large passive GPU - we'd much rather like an PCIe x1, PCIe x16, PCI, PCI arrangement.
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TGressus - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
Other side...AstroGuardian - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
Dude!! That's a power input connector not an output!silverblue - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
...to go with my XP1700+ and 512MB of RAM, but it started exhibiting instability after only a month. Wouldn't work at 133MHz RAM/133MHz FSB. Had to periodically drop it to 100MHz FSB and eventually after some time at 100/100, it wouldn't even boot. Along the way I got some more RAM, a new PSU and even applied some thermal paste to the NB (as was recommended for such boards at the time - the heatsink was extremely hot), no help... got a KT266A board and instantly saw a noticable performance increase - it was that good.The shop I bought the KT266A board from said they'd had nothing but trouble with the K7S5As. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they? Still, it was a decent board, if only it had worked properly.
xeopherith - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
I bought one ECS board that was rated really well in the 'budget performance' category years ago and it treated me well. Honestly I cant remember how long ago it was but I know it was after 2003. I never really thought of ECS as a bad company, they just weren't really ever geared for performance.silverblue - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
The price is a little high but considering what you get on such a small board, it's definitely worth considering. I've never actually seen a desktop board that uses laptop memory before - quite ingenius if you're low on space.Acanthus - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
They built trash boards and have had crap end-user support for a very long time.Market all you want, the people with memories aren't going to let it slide.
No bios updates, crap website, slow RMAs, piss poor QC, incompatibility issues with power supplies and memory... the list goes on and on.
I wont trust them with my money, ever.
Ben90 - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
Not even one picture of the girls....METALMORPHASIS - Thursday, June 17, 2010 - link
Just got through cleaning and installing new software on a friends ECS board machine from 5 years ago.It still works fine today even w/win7 on it.
Oxford Guy - Friday, June 18, 2010 - link
is cheesy.paihuaizhe - Sunday, June 20, 2010 - link
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