Compatibility Of Existing Motherboards With Conroe

Conroe, Intel's new desktop processor, is to be announced in several months and its advantage over existing models makes no doubts. Perhaps, some of you already began thinking about upgrading your systems. However, it was unclear which motherboards could actually support Conroe.

Those few unofficial Conroe benchmarks covered either early revisions of Broadwater (Intel P965) based motherboards, or hardware-patched boards on Intel 975X. The latter theoretically could support Conroe, but the layout of early revisions made it impossible to install new processors. In particular, in [H]ard|OCP forums they mentioned that Conroe requires at least revision 303 of Intel D975XBXLKR motherboard.

Speaking of Intel 955X, they weren't to support Conroe, but there were rumours of newer BIOS versions that could make this possible.

At the moment we managed to obtain information from the technical department of ASUSTeK, according to which this issue can't be solved by software means due to power wiring. This is related to at least P5WD2 Premium, P5WD2-E Premium and P5WDG2-WS, but will possibly affect motherboards of other vendors as well.

Therefore, in case of Intel 955X based solutions, upgrade to Conroe will require a newer motherboard as well. Such products have already been announced, e.g. ASUS P5B Deluxe at CEBiT 2006. And the price of Broadwater-based solutions promises to be more affordable then that of Intel 975X boards.

Source: iXBT