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(Image courtesy of SysOpt.com)

Thomas Soderstrom
SysOpt.com

The Asus brand brings with it a better reputation for quality, and often a price increase to match. Yet, Asus has also proven that it's serious about its push into lower-cost markets: So will its 650i motherboard, the P5N-E SLI, rival ECS' NF650iSLIT-A and prove itself a value leader as well?

For most of its existence, the AMD processor platform has heavily depended on third party chipsets made by VIA, nVIDIA, ATI, ALI, or SIS. It's fortunes were tied to the performance and capabilities of 3rd party core logic. In 2006 AMD gobbled up the Canadian videocard company ATi. ATI had been making headway with its own line of motherboard chipsets, and for the first time since this merger AMD has had its own in-house motherboard chipset to pair with an Athlon64 processor. The last time the planets aligned like this was with the AMD750 Irongate (Slot A) and the AMD760 (Socket A, SMP platform), but in each of those situations that was core logic born out of utter necessity.

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EP-AD580 XR.

The AD580 XR board supports all current AMD Socket AM2 CPUs including the FX-62 and 6000+. AMD introduced their AM2 platform last year with support for DDR2 memory. The chipset supports HyperTransport with up to 2 GigaTransfers per second with 16bit up and down links.

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ABIT IN9 32X-MAX 680i-SLI.

From Virtual-Hideout:

Things have been so good as of late with the latest Intel processors that it brings back old school memories of the NForce 2 days when motherboards were reaching what was then considered excellent overclocking records. Such milestones were set with the birth of the CCFL neon lights, LED Fans, and heat spreaders on memory sticks. Quake 3 was one of the pinnacle of first person shooter games and modding your case was the talk of the town. It was all about draining everything you could out of your game machine to get any edge over your opponent while showing off your system inside your case. The state of computer affairs have progressed so much that anyone can find a pre-modified case or component for cheap. There are still some elites continuing the shadow art who still appreciate good games on great gaming systems that have the perfect modified theme.