To be honest, I hate it when people arrive late at a meeting, and I can say the same with hardware products that arrive late. Forunately, I am not upgrading my computers that often to be affected by the last delays announced, but it seems the hardware market goes through a real delays plague this winter. Just think about AMD and NVIDIA's announced delays... and now, Intel joins the crowd...


In fact, there is no big story here. While the current high-end chipset, X38, is still pretty fresh on the market, the X48 was expected a but earlier by Intel's partners, but they won't get it yet. In a notice from the CPU manufacturer, Intel's partners were informed that the X48 will be delayed until early March.

These being the facts, no manufacturer will get to see the X48 earlier, not even Intel's closest partners, Asus and Gigabyte, and with no official reason about this delay, rumors go that some big motherboard manufacturer may still have a large volume of X38 chipsets in its inventory, but I wouldn't bet on that.

Now that the new 45nm processors from Intel started to become available, it would be an inspired move to grab a brand new mainboard too. Obviously, that is only true if you are planning to upgrade to a new Core 2 Duo CPU, but since DFI just announced a new mainboard from its LANParty series that uses the X38 chipset, it's the prefect occasion for you to add another option to the "mainboard for my new 45nm Intel CPU" list...

The LANPart DK X38-T2R is DFI's latest release that joins the high-end mainboard family LANParty, featuring the X38 and ICH9R chipsets from Intel, and having support for FSB speeds up to 1333MHz, the speed required by the latest 45nm processors belonging to the Core 2 Duo family. If you're on a budget, then I am sure you'd be pleased to find out that this mainboard supports DDR2 memory with speeds up to 1066MHz, and it features 8-channel HD onboard audio, as well as a total of 4-phase digital PWM for increased stability.

As you probably expected, all the other features one would like to have are available, such as PCIE 2.0, CrossFireX support, SATA II, and was build using solid capacitors Japan-made, so these boards should work without any problems when their time would have been long gone.

Since this is such a hot product, there is no information about availability and pricing yet, but I am sure these boards should be available in your area just in time for the new 45nm Intels (well, as long as you are not in Japan or another lucky spot where these can already be found).