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Wednesday 6th June 2007
Foxconn shows next-gen motherboards 11:23AM, Wednesday 6th June 2007
Foxconn has unveiled motherboards based around Intel's enthusiast X38 chipset and AMD's forthcoming socket AM2+.

Speaking at Computex 2007, Foxconn confirmed it had been sitting on boards and CPUs for some time, confirming Intel's bullish claim that '45nm chips are ready to roll'.

We've full details of the X38 chipset here but Foxconn adds something more to the mix with support for both ATi's CrossFire and Nvidia's SLI (while Abit was unsure whether it would support either).

When pressed as to how Foxconn had managed to placate both parties, a spokesperson admitted it was using older driver versions to bring the compatibility through software rather than hardware.

The board also features the new ICH9R south bridge and PCI Express 2.0 support.

 
 
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This doubles the bandwidth of each PCI Express lane (and therefore every PCI-Express connection), while remaining backwards compatible with the current PCI Express 1.1 standard. We're yet to see any graphics cards that take advantage of this faster standard, however.


Almost hidden away on the stand was a fully built system with an AM2+ motherboard. This new AMD socket was announced roughly four months ago, a decision that's been partially blamed for the slowdown in interest in AMD CPUs of late. The socket will accept the forthcoming Phenom CPUs as well as Socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2s.

Supporting the new socket was AMD's new 790X chipset with CrossFire, plus HyperTransport 3 to give up to 4.4GB/s chip-to-chip bandwidth, and PCI-Express 2.0 support. That's an impressive list, but Foxconn also claims the board can only take DDR2 RAM up to 800MHz, not DDR3 or 1,033MHz DDR2.

For PC Pro's coverage of the latest news from Computex 2007 see: www.pcpro.co.uk/html/computex2007

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