[H]ardNews 6th Edition

Granite Bay Look I:

AMD3D has a look at the board from Asus. I read the review and it leaves a couple of my questions unanswered about the abilities of the chipset itself, but we are working on getting those answered. It looks to be a screamer OCer. This is the same engineering sample board we tested in June.

In fact the Asus P4G8X is one of the fastest P4 motherboard I've reviewed. It's performance is beyond anything I have ever seen to date.

Granite Bay Look II:

While I don't think the DFI board is going to be even close to the popularity of the Asus boards here in the states, performance is still certainly worth a look over at Hexus. Also, we have a fully working sample of the MSI Granite Bay board as well in testing now.

Dual-channel DDR, in the guise of Intel's 'Granite Bay' chipset, looks likely to be manufactured and marketed by the larger first-tier motherboard manufacturers only. That's why it's nice to see a relative minnow produce and market a strong and viable alternative. Inherently expensive, but rather quick, the DFI NB80-EA is a fine example of an emerging technology.

MSI 4200-8X:

AMD3D reviews the card but they don't OC it. I think that is what most of the folks reading here would want to know anyway as we all know about NV25 technology by now.

The NV25 technology has slower memory chips than the NV18 cards. I would therefore assume that the ability to over-clock is not as great as the NV18 cards. I did not over-clock this card myself. My thoughts on over-clocking are, if you are confident with it do it. But for reviews I will keep the settings as factory default as the majority of the market do not over-clock.

Then again, maybe it is best that he did not OC it.