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Gigabyte has released another
high-end motherboard – GA-x48-DQ6. This mother features Intel’s X48
chipset with strong performance. It also uses the company’s new Dynamic
Energy Saver technology. This new technology reduces the power
consumption by combining hardware and software to dynamically throttle
the processor voltage and clock speed. This also means less heat, which
is an issue for high-end motherboard using high-end components, such as
high-end processor and graphic card. Of course, reducing voltage and
power does not mean it’s lacking in
performance. Otherwise, it would not be consider high-end motherboard.
Like all other high-end motherboard, Gigabyte offers a lot of options for tweaking performance in its
BIOS. Overclocking the processor with this
motherboard was a breeze. The Computer Power User magazine’s crews were
able to overclock the Intel quad-cores
extreme processor, QX9650, to 533MHz FSB (Front Side Bus) from the
stock 333MHz FSB without altering the chipset voltage. That is quite an
impressive feast. Of course, for those non-overclockers,
the motherboard has a solid performance with stock speed with Intel
Core 2 Extreme QX9650. It scored 11,805 in the CineBench
multithreaded test. And the board got 30
seconds for LAME MT benchmark and 184 seconds for Sony Vegas benchmark.
Aside from the solid performance from the board, it also has other
features. GA-X48-DQ6 support DDR2 memory up to 1,200MHz and has JMicron and Intel RAID controllers. The board
support up to 8GB of RAM. And for
multimedia consumers, the motherboard has 8 USB 2.0 ports and 2
FireWire ports. It supports CrossFire for
graphic hunger folks. The board also offers a lot
of expansion slots. It has three PCI-E x1 slots and 2 regular PCI slots. I am sure that most people
will be needing these expansion since the
board offer integrated audio and gigabit ethernet.
Right now the board cost $299 to the
consumers. That’s relatively a high price
comparing to its competitor high-end motherboard. However, considering
the solid performance this board offer with many other features,
Gigabyte GA-x48-DQ6 is worthy of consideration.
Click here
to visit the official website.