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Over the past couple of months (and last few recent reviews), I have become increasingly impressed with the Intel P35 "Bearlake" chipset. This new generation of chipset follows in the footsteps of the venerable Intel P965 and P975 chipsets. Asus has elected to take that very P35 chipset in decidedly different direction. The new Asus Blitz Extreme motherboard has put a new spin on things.

Through a little bit of digital wizardry (I'm sure), Asus has been able to take the standard 16x by 4x PCI-e lanes standard to the P35 and shuffle them about. The end result is dual 8x PCIx slots for a little something called Crosslink. It may not be SLI, and it certainly isn't the full 16x by 16x support we would all hope for, but could be that added kick that gamers (and ATI loyalists) are looking for. And not to spoil anything, but I just can't help but let this one out: the Blitz is pre-plumbed for water cooling.

And there's those other defining features of the P35 chipset. It has upped the ante with its increased 1333MHz front side bus frequency which is a small but welcome improvement. The addition of native DDR3 memory support makes the new chipset even more promising. On the downside however, DDR3 memory is still somewhat immature (as noted in our recent comparison article "DDR2 vs. DDR3: The Battle of Latency vs. Bandwidth"). This immaturity means that despite the higher MHz rating of DDR3 over DDR2, the incredibly high latencies of DDR3 negates most, if not all performance advantages of current DDR3 when pitted against quality (and even generic) DDR2 modules.

Yes, first impressions are important and the Asus Blitz Extreme makes an impressive one. But as fate would have it, the Blitz Extreme seems to mimic another P35 Core2 DDR3 based motherboard we've recently tested. Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi motherboard holds similar traits, not to mention an errierly similar design. The Gigabyte 6-QUAD-P35T-DQ6 may be of another breed, but it too uses the P35 with DDR3 memory.

It would seem that DDR3 is taking root, despite that initial performance/price hurdle.

So, Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, and there's an Asus Blitz Extreme motherboard inside. First order of business: the feature sets.