DDR3 Is Here—Get Used to It
IN FOCUSIf there’s one thing we know, it’s that changes in memory
technology rarely go over well. The move from PC100 SDRAM
to Direct RDRAM was a disaster, and the move from DDR to
DDR2 wasn’t pretty either. People bitch and moan when it’s
time to toss their RAM. Well, we’ve got news for you, Bubba,
it’s time to switch yet again. If you care about performance, if
you want to see your RAM clocking in at 1,800MHz data rates,
then DDR3 is the only game in town. It’s even getting afford-
able. While many people still think 2GB of DDR3 costs $500,you can actually get it for $120. You won’t get the highest
frequency or the lowest latency DDR3 RAM for that price, but
it sure as hell makes DDR3 performance more accessible
than it was six months ago. That said, DDR2 is still a viable op-
tion, which should console folks who have a ton of it around or
just aren’t after that extra bit of performance. Just know that
most motherboard vendors are offering only their very best
models in DDR3 trim.Intel
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Maybe Intel should give up on making performance motherboards
Intel Intel DX48BT2DX48BT2
You’d think an Intel chipset would stand the best chance in a
board designed by Intel. That’s not the case. The desktop partner
to Intel’s crazy-ass Skulltrail platform, the DX48BT2 board is
code-named Bonetrail, and of the four boards here, it is the
most disappointing. The fi rst misstep stares you right in the
face: The six SATA ports are in a silly location and point
straight up. Mount any dual-GPU card in the board and
you block access to two ports. With a dual dual-GPU con-
fi guration, you lose access to four of the six SATA ports.
Right-angle cables would help you regain access to two
of those ports—too bad Intel doesn’t include them.
The good news is that the board is based on
Intel’s hot, new X48 chipset. With support for
a wider array of older CPUs than the nForce
boards, there’s something to be said for having
an Intel-branded chipset. Stability and reliabil-
ity are hallmarks of the name. On the other
hand, those qualities sometimes come at the
expense of performance—at least that’s been our experi-
ence with Intel-branded chipsets and boards. The DX48BT2 didn’t
back our expectations. It trailed the other motherboards in almost
every benchmark, albeit not by huge margins.
The DX48BT2 was also the most diffi cult board to overclock.
We just couldn’t push the board as hard as the others without lock
ups. More annoyingly, if you blow an overclock, the board falls into
a reboot loop instead of just resetting, as the other boards here do.
Admittedly, some fault lies with the overclocker, but the unfriendly
nature of the BIOS certainly didn’t help us. Don’t get us wrong:
Overclocking is possible—you just need to jump through hoops toget there. We would recommend this board as a nice, safe choice
for a conservative
family member, but
we wouldn’t use it
ourselves.The DX48BT2 left us cold with its poorly
placed SATA ports and clumsy BIOS.44 | MAXIMUMPC | JUL 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
VERDICT$260, http://www.intel.com^6
INTEL DX48BT2Intel turns its back on legacy hardware by ditching PS/2, serial, and parallel ports but offers a bounty of USB ports.