Hardware First look: MSI’s Westmere H57M-ED65 Mobo

I doubt that's the reason my motherborad only has one ps/2 slot on it and its a couple of years old, its only necessary to have atleast one for the keyboard.

They probably just did it for convience, this boards got loads of i/o ports its sweeet!

 

There is nothing wrong with Foxconn sockets. The only problem is if you apply too much force to install the cooler, like you do with LN2 or dry ice cooling. Then this happens to your backplate :
http://pctuning.tyden.cz/images/stories/Novinkari/koci/2111-4/socket.jpg

See ? It's not straight anymore, and that is the reason the CPU pins doesn't touch the CPU pad anymore.

So unless you are planing to screw your cooler so much that motherboard will bend, then you can safely buy Foxconn sockets too.

 

I have a 630i Foxconn board and it bows so bad when I put the cooler on there. First and last Foxconn for me.

 

Oh no, that's for the 1TB/s PCIe hard drive...

 

I work with 'BIOS' (well, UEFI) for a living at the moment, and USB is one of the areas I theoretically have some expertise.
Yes, USB is a total PITA to work with, especially for any sort of legacy system that expects something that looks like a PC clone in the mid 80s.

You need a lot of stuff to get USB running. But I can read data from a PS2 keyboard with a bare handful of instructions. As a bonus, you do not need RAM, or even PCI to use the PS2 keyboard, that means you can use it right from the time you hit the on switch. The same cannot be said for USB.

The easiest way to get PS/s ports is a "super I/O" or SIO chip (the one right behind the SATA ports). And it coems with a lot of other legacy ports that can make development easier (like serial ports) then be turned off for production.
I'm not sure the IDE ports though. I think that is the other chip next to the SIO.
I can see it being useful for optical drives, especially considering how someone can get attached to one that is good at reading certain media and handling certain software.

 

PS/2 keyboard ports Cheesecake!

Finding PS/2 to USB adaptors that work well with my Model M keyboard are a pain.

 

I predict i3 to be released in Jan 2010

The i3 Pentium technology (aka Clackdale) will be based on LGA1156 with built-in Intel Graphics (H55 / H57) with 2 Core / 4 Threads
As I understand, it should support Dual independent display thus supporting Three Digital Display Ports (Any combination of HDMI/DVI/DP)
The chipset should also support a 16X Gen2 slot on the board.

I very much doubt it will perform like current i5 processors.

Interesting, can’t wait to see the reviews and performance between i3 and i5
Although the i3 processor will be cheaper than current i5