Intel may make changes to manufacturing life cycle, specifications, and product descriptions at any time, without notice. The whole package is heavily weighed under the assumption that a standard ATX case will be used.All information provided is subject to change at any time, without notice. The southbridge supports a total of eight USB 2.0, and given the rear I/O only supplies four you’re left with an extra two that will probably be used at the front of the case. No extra Firewire PCI brackets are included, and there are only two extra USB ports. This is ironic since the front page of the manual explicitly states that "This product is intended to be professionally installed". However unlike most manuals, Intel has gone the extra mile and made it not only colour (OK, a frivolous point) but it has also included a ton of definitions and extra detail to make it one of the most newbie friendly purchases we've ever seen. It’s mostly for OEMs to stick to the insides of cases letting the end user know what’s going on, and stickers are sometimes more convenient than manuals, providing your case changes with your motherboard. There’s also a wealth of information from motherboard manuals and stickers telling you how to install everything. One ATA133 connector and one floppy connector.Two IEEE1394a Firewire ports (one on rear I/O panel, one via on-board pins/expansion brackets).Support for eight USB 2.0 ports (four on rear I/O panel, four via on-board pins/expansion brackets).Marvell 88SE61XX RAID controller with four SATA ports (eSATA support on the red SATA plus).Four native SATA 3Gbps ports supporting RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD with Intel Matrix Storage.Intel 82573L Gigabit Ethernet LAN Controller.SigmaTel STAC9274D High-Definition Audio codec with 8 channel audio, jack sensing, and S/PDIF. ![]() ![]() ![]() Three PCI-Express x16 slots for CrossFire (top two running either x16 and x1, or x8 and x8, and third slot locked to x4).Support for up to 8GB of DDR2-533, DDR2-667 or DDR2-800MHz memory.Support for all Intel LGA775 processors, including Pentium 4, Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme.The initial Bad Axe board didn't support Core 2, but support was bolted on after revision 304 the reason for this was because Core 2 required a change in the way the board handled power regulation. It's the second iteration of the Bad Axe, and is more enthusiast friendly than the first edition. Today, we have a look at the performance / desktop version of the board, coined the D975XBX2, to find out if it's any good. Reliability and robustness are both key to the two different usage models in completely different ways and we're assuming that's why the company has two different boards for the two different applications. The 975X chipset has quite a wide range of usage patterns, as Intel markets the chipset as both a performance desktop and a workstation chipset. ![]() Thus, the chip giant wanted to tap into the overclocking / gaming money pit that is becoming increasingly important to tech companies. When Intel launched its Core 2 Duo processors, the company naturally became 'trendy' with the enthusiast crowd again after being out of favour for quite some time thanks to AMD's long standing Athlon 64 architecture. Intel's 975X Express chipset has been around since November 2005 (that's two thousand and five - Ed.), so you're probably wondering why we're not only revisiting an old chipset, but also a 'reference' board, too. Intel Desktop Board D975XBX2 Price (as reviewed): £149.48 (inc VAT)
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