Tom's Hardware Visits Intel's Motherboard Team

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TheProfosist

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great to hear. my P3 intel board was crazy stable. i have stuck with asus since the P4 era but ill turn some of my attention back to intel now.
 

compton

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I just got a new DP67BGb3 and I'm diggin it. I had a great P4 Intel board, the D865PERL with sata, optical and coaxial digital audio out, and several other nice features -- except for overclocking. The board is still good 8 years later. The DP67BG feels like more of a successor to that, except for the overclocking and the Extreme Skull (which is actually kind cool -- I likes it). Some of the early criticisms of the board in January are no longer valid (like cold boot problems with 1600mhz ect). I very much appreciate the care and thought Intel put into the board and hope that they keep up the high level of excellence as represented by the DX58SO2 and DP67BG.
 

ivaroeines

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I think the multi phased(8+) motherboards is more about marketing than a stability thing, we(the normal consumer) tend go for motherboards with many phases in the belief that their better than one with few phases.

Intel is in a lucky spot, they are so well off that they dont have to compete, they can just work on a product till its ready and rock solid, and their products just become awesome and Intel become even more well off.
 

ojas

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[citation][nom]ivaroeines[/nom]...Intel is in a lucky spot, they are so well off that they dont have to compete, they can just work on a product till its ready and rock solid, and their products just become awesome and Intel become even more well off.[/citation]

yeah pretty cool ppl...i remember reading that they entered the SSD market just for the sake of improving SSDs...respect these guys a lot, really...

[citation][nom]greghome[/nom]...never had a Intel branded board fail in 10 years[/citation]

neither have I...very stable products...
 
[citation][nom]ivaroeines[/nom]I think the multi phased(8+) motherboards is more about marketing than a stability thing, we(the normal consumer) tend go for motherboards with many phases in the belief that their better than one with few phases.[/citation]
Once you get past 3-4 phases, I agree. Two few phases doing too much work (including the poor balancing of many phases that Intel mentions) could cause failures. Varying the number of operating phases based on load does apparently yield some energy savings, although that shouldn't take more than 4-6 to implement either.
[citation][nom]ivaroeines[/nom]Intel is in a lucky spot, they are so well off that they dont have to compete, they can just work on a product till its ready and rock solid, and their products just become awesome and Intel become even more well off.[/citation]
That IS how Intel competes; they just need to do a better job of letting people know that. Read the comments here though to see word-of-mouth at work; I'll add my agreement that the Intel boards I've owned have been very stable.
 

ionut19

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I can't believe how boring this article is, or better said the videos.
PS: the videos load fast, i click play and after 1 second when all of the commercials are loaded the video resets and i have to click play again..
 

ceh4702

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My last motherboard was an integrated 720p HD Video motherboard. It works great in dual display so we can watch Korean historical videos online. I have gotten to the point where almost no american TV is worth watching. My biggest problem is Microsoft operating systems and IE being a substandard video blocking product.
 

ceh4702

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I think lately Intel has done a fairly good job at competing. Even though they have no real competition from AMD, they keep reinventing the wheel and manage to stay so far ahead of AMD that I dont think AMD will ever catch up at this point. I dont really see the big advantage to overclocking anyway. In fact it is overclockers that are pushing up prices for the rest of us. The strange thing is it is overclocking that also makes better standard products available. If it was not for overclockers trying to RMA all the products they destroy, computer parts would be less expensive for everyone else.
 

eyemaster

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Articles such as this make me show more respect towards the work the companies (in this case, Intel) put into products they sell.

Very nice, I like.
 

cangelini

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[citation][nom]fball922[/nom]Surprised Tom's would post this after that embarrassing advertorial on Intel motherboards.[/citation]

This story--an editorial opportunity--had nothing to do with the advertorial that went up. I've already expressed my disagreement with the fact that was even posted to \articles\ (even though it's clearly labeled as a sponsored piece).
 
[citation][nom]ceh4702[/nom]My last motherboard was an integrated 720p HD Video motherboard. It works great in dual display so we can watch Korean historical videos online. I have gotten to the point where almost no american TV is worth watching. My biggest problem is Microsoft operating systems and IE being a substandard video blocking product.[/citation]

There are American-made TVs? ;)


Back on subject - getting to visit Intel's lab must be just wholly awesome. Some of my professors at Purdue worked with them on some research a little while back, and I think that's how they're developing the 22nm and smaller transistors.
 

king_maliken

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[citation][nom]boiler1990[/nom]There are American-made TVs? Back on subject - getting to visit Intel's lab must be just wholly awesome. Some of my professors at Purdue worked with them on some research a little while back, and I think that's how they're developing the 22nm and smaller transistors.[/citation]
They've had these transistors in the works for quite a while now, and they successfully made smaller chips by using these transistors...
Onto this article; I personally really liked it, and must confess that I would love to have their job.
 

joshyboy82

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So I open the embedded video and it barely loads at 360p on a 22mb broadband connection. I hit the source link to youtube and it istantly fully loaded? Web fail.
 

razor512

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On some boards the additional phases is to reduce heat as it is cheaper to add an extra phase than it is to add a heatsink (when you consider pure production cost) The downside is since the phases are not 100% efficient, you increase overall power consumption)

It is also largely marketing. People like higher numbers. To the average user, they may thing "I don't know what that is but this board has more of it than the other board for the same price"

When I get these types of board, I run it without the side panel for the forst few hours while running a CUDA accelerated password cracker (mainly because it maxes the CPU and GPU the entire time and gets hotter temperatures than even prime95)

I then use the thermal probe that came with my multimeter, then place it against each of the phase chips (my msi board had no heatsinks on them)

I then monitor the temperatures, and what I found was that each phase had about the same temperature so the power was being shared evenly, especially with a CPU using well over 140 watts since it is overclocked (Phenom II x4 965 overclocked)

So not sure about all other boards but in my case with the msi board, the crazy amount of phases was to avoid the production cost of adding heatsinks to the phases.
 

djridonkulus

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Newb question:

Why does Intel use Prime95 and not IntelBurnTest?

I was told IBT works the cpu harder and produces more heat than Prime95 does, and it even does it faster, completing a pass in under 5 minutes as opposed to P95's hours.

Please enlighten me.
 

thechief73

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Awesome article... I love the strait from the horse's mouth aspect of it, and not just a second hand overlook. Now can we get the same thing on Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI? Please =) Though this might require quite a bit more traveling than taking a trip to Intel.
 
G

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Eh... I made it more or less through the first page, where they are using sub-zero cooling and unsustainable voltage to achieve higher overclocking... Revolutionary I tell ya, never been done before...

As a side note: Since Tom's is now ***officially*** sponsored by Intel, can we assume a fair bit of bias in these AMD vs. Intel articles? After many years of trolling about it, I think quite a few people owe me an apology....
 

cangelini

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[citation][nom]harry_palms_jr[/nom]Eh... I made it more or less through the first page, where they are using sub-zero cooling and unsustainable voltage to achieve higher overclocking... Revolutionary I tell ya, never been done before...As a side note: Since Tom's is now ***officially*** sponsored by Intel, can we assume a fair bit of bias in these AMD vs. Intel articles? After many years of trolling about it, I think quite a few people owe me an apology....[/citation]

Not at all--my editorial department has absolutely nothing to do with any clearly-labeled sponsored content that the sales team involves itself in.

My team continues to work closely with both Intel and AMD (and Nvidia).

Best,
Chris
 

w00tgrant

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@ djridonkulus

Simple to answer. How many over clocker's do you see out there claiming world records using IBT??? None I suspect. Intel uses the same tools for those types of numbers that the users are running. Software such as Prime95 can not be accused of being slanted to one platform or the other ( or has not been so far).
 
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