New Intel Chipsets
posted in Hardware, Technology |Intel introduced the new 3-series chipsets today. The usual sites have some good write-up. Looks like I’m going to want to hold out until the X38 comes out in Q3 for my desktop machine although the P35 should be fine for the media-center box. It will also be interesting to see how the G35 turns out (shipping also in Q3)- whether the video decode acceleration will be good enough to run a really good media center vs. using a GF8600GTS. I’ll likely still be going for the NVidia card- Intel’s integrated video has come a long way but its still going to be miles away from a discrete card.
One key improvement to me is that the RAID-1 support is supposed to be much better. With the new board things like boot time are supposed to be much better under RAID-1, which makes that more of an attractive option for me.
There are some cool looking Asus motherboards that have lots of heat-pipe cooling for the chipsets, etc.