Intel has been eating a little a crow from the former underdogs known as AMD, and this has put a damper on the Intel platforms attention by the enthusiasts market. As the new wave of current new gadgets is in dual-core technology, Intel has released their own flavor of CPUs and motherboards to support them. The new i945/955 chipsets support the new dual-core CPUs and this is a bit different than AMD's approach which let users implement their new dual-core CPUs on motherboards currently in mass distribution. This alone makes me take a step back in consideration as now not only do I buy the expensive CPU, I also must incur an additional cost of a new motherboard in the $155-$245 dollar price range to go dual-core Intel style. The power requirements of the new LGA775 CPUs are not compatible with the older i915/925 chipset boards and hence the i945/955 chipset boards were born to support them.
I do understand that there are some excellent features on the new i945/955 chipsets boards, but I have yet to delve completely into them, as the Intel reference board although stable, was very vanilla in its nature. Gigabyte is always one to fully exploit all aspects of a board's capability when they implement a new chipset into their design and I am sure we will see some improvements over Intel's test sample. The board I received was a pre-release sample candidate and not the full retail package so there is a chance the boards selling now may have slightly changed a bit. Gigabyte's GA-8I955X Royal is one of the flagship motherboards for their new Intel lineup and will probably be decked out in features to qualify for the Royal nomenclature so my expectations are high. The GA-8I955X Royal is one of the new breed of GIGABYTE i-DNA (Intelligent Dual Nano Architecture) series motherboards and is geared up to please the gamer and enthusiasts crowd. Is it up to all the hype, or is it just another silicon face in the crowd? Follow along as we take a close look at the GA-8I955X Royal from the folks at Gigabyte.
