MSI's $150 X58 Motherboard Previewed
We were speaking with MSI a few weeks ago about their upcoming product plans and one item stood out in the conversation. No, it was not the excellent 790FX-GD70 motherboard that has earned our admiration and soon our praise, nor was it the new N260GTX-Lightning Black Edition GTX 260 video card or their updates to the Wind Netbook line. Now, all of these and some we cannot discuss are actually very interesting products for their market segments. However, when we heard X58 and $150 in the same sentence, our ear lobes tweaked and sly smiles developed on our faces. We were told that MSI was hard at work on delivering an X58 motherboard as close to the $150 mark as possible.
We thought this idea was really interesting and certainly made sense when looking at the current Intel product lineup - a lineup that currently means either means going Socket 775 and buying into the P45 chipset in the $85~$130 range or smartly bypassing the now defunct X38/X48 lineup for the X58 product along with its processor and RAM upgrade requirements. The mere mention of X58 typically means a $300 ringtone goes off in our minds. Lately, that ringtone has become softer as several boards are available in the sub $200 range including MSI’s X58 Pro and various models from ECS, Foxconn, DFI, and Gigabyte. http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3568 | 