DDR2 And DDR3!

Intel has recently unleashed out many new chipsets into the market and the X48 is one of the latest. MSI has released a board based on this chipset—the MSI X48C Platinum. The board supports ATI’s CrossfireX through two PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots.

The design is spruced up with copper fins and heat sinks. The feature that makes the X48C special is that the board supports both DDR 2 and DDR 3 RAM. There are two slots for DDR2 and four for DDR3, which allow for a maximum of 4 and 8 GB of RAM respectively. Both the RAM modules will not operate together and a separate memory turbo cards are provided to place in the unused slots.

The layout is clean overall, but there are no clips to lock cards in place. The SATA ports are placed out the way of the PCI-E slots. Realtek’s ALC 888 is used as the audio solution for the motherboard, and it also has Realtek’s 8111B Gigabit networking solution. At the rear end, there is no shortage of connectivity options. There are eight USB ports and also two PS2 ports for the keyboard and mouse, which had become a rarity on some of the newer boards.

The board performed flawlessly in the tests. Once again, there is little performance improvement over the other chipsets and manufacturers. It lags a little behind than the nForce 790i motherboards in some of the synthetic memory benchmarks.