DH Review: XFX Motherboard Roundup

Zardon

Read The Review Here
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Every hardware enthusiast should know the name XFX as they are synonymous with the fastest performing Nvidia products on the market. Whether you are shopping for the ultimate graphics card or the highest specification motherboard it is hard to go wrong with the XFX branded versions.

High end is not their only area of expertise however and recently XFX offered us the opportunity to review a number of their value segment motherboards with onboard graphics, they told us that their products were capable of taking on the best AMD and Intel had to offer. This is quite a claim so after tracking down some impressive AM2/Socket 775 boards we put XFX to their word.

IvanV

The biggest impression is how the to socket 775 systems managed to stay on pair (and even beat) G33, despite being limited to only one memory channel. I was expecting that to have a much greater impact when the boards were paired with a quad core processor.

CDsDontBurn

the boards are nice, i like the features of the boards and all except for the layout of the SATA ports.

if there is a card that would be long enough, like an 8800GT or 9600GT etc., it would interfere with the SATA ports and would limit you to just two SATA Ports.

Matth

Something must be wrong, how can single channel beat dual channel?

The only thing I can think of, working the RAM at dual 667 and tighter (correct for 667) timings may have been better, as it is matched to 1333 FSB.

If the RAM was at 800, then that kind of suggests that the Nvidia chipset is better at pulling together an odd FSB to RAM ratio than the Intel chipset - with a "natural" setup of dual channel RAM at half FSB, I'd expect the Intel chipset to walk it in every round.

Veridian3

There is nothing wrong as such but some tests are more reliant on memory bandwidth than others. For example if we were to run PCmarks memory tests on the systems the G33 would win with ease. Additionally it didnt lose every real world test, the video encoding for example is much faster on the intel chipset than the nvidia. ( http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews....=603&pageid=12 )


In general though you have made a reasonable point about how well Nvidia do with their memory performance. The 790i tends to be a little faster than the X48 and as the review showed the 8200 beats AMD's own 790G. They are also great with memory configuration options and the option to Link/unlink speeds is by far the best available... thats not to say they are without fault because compatibility can be an issue at times and there are some little quirks surrounding how much memory you can use at particular speeds... or what slots you can use.