First Nehalem Machine Built

Maximum PC was lucky enough to get the opportunity to head into a secret Intel lab which we can only guess was housed 20 floors below sea-level. In their feature, they attempt to build a rig using an unreleased Intel D58XSO motherboard and showcase the ease and potential snags of building a new system when the chips arrive.

They learned that the actual CPU is much bigger than the older LGA775 chips, and as a result, older heatsinks will not be compatible. Motherboard layouts will also be slightly revised, and some boards with six DIMM slots will be a tight fit for some builders. They reported that the move to tri-channel DDR3 didn’t give a huge performance increase, but since this is a preview board, these findings will likely be slower compare to what we’ll see when the new products are released to the public.

It’s the worst kept secret in the industry: Intel’s next-generation Penryn killer, codenamed Nehalem is just around the corner. We’ve been seeing leaked benchmarks based on early silicon for months, and Nehalem’s Wikipedia page is already packed with unconfirmed specifications. All indications – and this is with more optimizations to come, mind you – is that Nehalem may be a bad mother worthy of having Isaac Hayes pound out a theme song for it.