Intel’s recent launch of the X58 chipset has led to many reviews praising the new chipset and CPU as being the fastest available to the consumer right now. Intel has the entire high end covered with the under $300 Core i7 920, the $500+ Core i7 940 and the $999 Core i7 965 XE. Intel sells their chipsets at a retail price of nearly the same as the CPUs meaning that a new system based upon the new CPU will cost over $1000 when you add in the cost of memory and hard drives and other components.
AMD has a hard time competing as their CPUs are not competitive with the latest offerings from Intel. I’ve reviewed motherboards from ASUS, ECS, and MSI based upon this chipset but what about the reference board from Intel? Intel generally makes good stable reference boards leaving the tweaking to the other board manufacturers based upon their reference design. Intel has tried to shake the feeling by releasing tweaked boards like the X48 Bonetrail 2 reference design. Last month they released the X58 chipset with the codename Smackover. The reference board is called the DX58SO and is on the review bench today.
