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MSI's X48 motherboard pictured

by on22 November 2007

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Exclusive: X48 Platinum


During a visit to MSI's headquarters in Taipei yesterday, Fudzilla got the first exclusive picture of MSI's upcoming X48 Platinum board, although we have to dissapoint you by telling you that there are no major changes to this board compared to MSI's X38 Platinum.

However, some changes to the layout of the board have been made to improve memory compatibility and performance, which is good news for overclockers. The X48 chipset does, of course, also add official support for 1600MHz bus speeds, although there is no reason why most X38 boards wouldn't be able to do this as long as the board manufacturer has added overclocking features.

The two yellow slots are apparently only using PCIe bandwidth from the ICH, which means they are limited to x4 bandwith, although MSI couldn't quite explain to us how both slots can get this much bandwith, since the ICH only has six lanes in total. The extra chip below the ICH is a PCIe bridge that splits the bandwidth between the two slots. This also limits the two yellow slots to PCIe 1.0, rather than being 2.0 as with the blue slots.

The boards are pretty much ready to go, and it seems like most motherboard manufacturers are just waiting for the go-ahead from Intel. Expect this board to be available sometime in early Q1 2008.

 msi_x48_board
Last modified on 23 November 2007
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