jmke

As new Mid-End chipsets from Intel, P43 and P45, are rather similar, many manufacturers are tempted to build their motherboard series on the cheaper P43. For example, ASRock officially announced this. MSI sticks to a more conservative strategy here -- its new motherboards series includes two sterling models (in terms of functionality and expandability) based on the P43 chipset. Usually this does not happen to motherboards on cheaper chipsets. In case of Intel it traditionally means significantly curtailed functionality. It's interesting that MSI offers a few couples of nearly identical motherboards, as the only PCIEx16 slot negates all chipset differences -- P45 supports two graphics interfaces configured as x8+x8, and P43 doesn't, which does not prevent engineers from using the classic x16+x4 configuration for Intel P43. When users choose between such two motherboards, they apparently pay inversely proportional to their knowledge level.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles3/...f-i43p-p1.html

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