HotHardware reviews Asus Blitz Formula and Extreme Intel P35 based motherboards
If you're a PC hardware enthusiast - and chances are pretty good that you are if you're reading HotHardware - Asus is a company that needs no introduction. Asus' track record for building quality products targeted squarely at power users is well known and documented, so we'll forego the history lesson here and get right to the point.
A couple of motherboards recently landed in the lab that filled a large void in the marketplace. Just after the introduction of Intel's new Core 2 Duo and Extreme processors with 1333MHz front side bus frequencies, if you wanted a motherboard that officially supported one of the new CPUs, that also had a balanced (and flexible) PCI Express lane configuration for better multi-GPU CrossFire support, you were basically up a creek. NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI chipset supported the new processors, but we all know there is a large contingent of enthusiasts who prefer using Intel processors with Intel chipsets. Them's the breaks. Unfortunately, the P35 chipset was the only game in town with true 1333MHz FSB and CrossFire support, and like the P965 that came before it, its PCI Express lane configuration was unbalanced. With the P35, the first PEG slot got a full 16 lanes of PCI Express connectivity, while the second slot got only 4. In addition, those 4 lanes powering the second slot were connected to the Southbridge, which then in turn has to interface with the Northbridge over another link, adding latency to the equation. This setup works fine for single-GPU configurations, and admittedly works fine for CrossFire, but it doesn't offer optimal performance...
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