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Asus P5K3 Deluxe

Motherboard chipset technology isn't refreshed at the same fevered pitch that processors, memory or IO products are. A CPU or GPU speed-bump is like low-lying fruit relatively speaking, but chipset enhancements can usher in a whole host of stability, interoperability and verification challenges. Let's face it, when the product is the basis for a platform foundation, forward migrations can be painful if not carefully planned, so the upside benefits need to be worth-while for both the end customer as well as the manufacturer.

If you asked us a year ago, what Intel's path to a higher bandwidth system bus and memory access was, we might have told you serial links from the CPU to the Northbridge and serial FBDIMM technology on the system memory. Of course, that would have been almost completely misguided, since obviously Intel is still pushing hard on their now aging legacy front side bus architecture, with only a hint of a serially connected CPU architecture on the horizon. In addition, though serial FBDIMMs have taken hold in the server market, where high density memory configurations benefit from the technology's intrinsic signal integrity advantages under multi-drop loads; it won't be showing up in consumer desktop volumes any time soon.

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