I recently had the opportunity to take a look at ABIT's new Alderwood and Grantsdale mainboards, both using LGA775 CPUs, while Tarinder got ASUS's first pair of competing boards.

My reviews are out of the block first and here's a couple of snippets from them. Was I impressed by ABIT's first LGA775 attempts?

The new platform's inherent downsides all manifest themselves with the AA8, given that it implements absolutely everything new. DDR-II is underwhelming, scarce and more expensive than DDR, PCI Express graphics cards are rarer than rocking horse poop and LGA775 CPUs are either hot, rare and expensive (3.6 P4 560), or not worth bothering about since they already exist on Socket 478, a socket that has many a brilliant motherboard.

Find the AA8 DuraMAX review here .

Given the AA8 as a base, the question to be asked of the AG8 is does its use of DDR memory make the platform any more attractive. Again, personally, I have to answer that with a resounding no. The only CPU you can get on LGA775, that you can't get on Socket 478, is the Pentium 4 560 at 3.6GHz. With that CPU costing as much as a very decent Socket 939 processor from AMD and the rest of the LGA775 CPU range available on Socket 478, the changes you'd need to make to move to the AG8, even taking your existing DDR memory with you, are too much of a sacrifice.

Find the AG8 review here.

Rys