Computex 2006: 300W GPUs, Conroe, HDMI Video Cards and Lots of Motherboards

MSI's Conroe Motherboards

Like most other motherboard manufacturers, MSI kicked off our meeting with a showing of its new Conroe motherboards.

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MSI's entry level P965 motherboard uses the regular ICH8, which only supports four SATA ports as you can see below:

The other important thing to note is that all of MSI's Conroe motherboards are passively cooled. MSI insists that you can adequately cool Intel's chipsets without resorting to more expensive heatpipes.

MSI's high end P965 motherboard with Conroe support uses the more expensive ICH8R option, which offers six SATA ports.

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As with all P965 motherboards there's no CrossFire support despite the two PCIe x16 slots (one is a x16 and the other is a x4).

Below we get a better look at the new P965 chipset beneath the MSI heatsink:

Intel's P965 chipset features a new memory controller design compared to previous Intel chipsets, however we have not been able to get an idea of how extensive the modifications are. We do know that this is the first Intel chipset to officially support DDR2-800, which may be all the redesigned memory controller offers.

Intel's new ICH8R is pictured below:

Like all other motherboard manufacturers making Conroe boards, if you want CrossFire support you need to go with the Intel 975X chipset. While both ATI and NVIDIA will have multi-GPU solutions with Conroe support, for now it's all about Intel's offerings.

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With the older ICH7R, MSI's 975X platinum only has 4 SATA ports that are driven by the South Bridge. The extra SATA port is provided by a third party controller.