Popping on by the ASRock stand at CeBIT 2010 and we took a
double-takeat a demonstration that highlighted some of the benefits of
its X58 chipset-based
motherboards.
The news that ASRock's X58 supports the as-yet-unreleased Intel
Gulftown 980X six-core chip isn't particularly shocking - most X58
boards will do so with a simple BIOS update. What is, we
reckon, is having said chip benchmarking CINEBENCH R10.
ASRock pointed out that it had Intel's permission to do so, and we
don't doubt the veracity of the fact, but it seems strange that the
chip giant would allow a partner to show performance figures in the
middle of a trade show.
ASRock confirmed our suspicions that the six-core, twelve-thread
monster, based on the 32nm Westmere architecture,
will ship
with a base frequency of 3.33GHz. The chip returns a benchmark score of
25,711 CINEMarks. This compares with a quad-core Core i7 975
Extreme Edition's result of around
20,000 CINEMarks, intimating
that it will have no problem in claiming the title of world's fastest
consumer CPU when it's released later on this month.
The words 'fast', 'new' and 'Intel' in the same sentence usually lead
to a wince-inducing etail price. We expect 980X to slip in at no less
than $999.
But ASRock had more on show than just a demonstration of Intel's
six-core desktop chip. The company's Chris Lee took us through a
whistlestop tour of high-end motherboards for both Intel and AMD chips.
