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ASRock blatantly displays Intel's unreleased six-core Core i7 980X chip at CeBIT 2010

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Published: Wed 3rd Mar, 2010 | Author: Tarinder Sandhu
Companies: AsRock (All AsRock content), Intel (All Intel content)

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Popping on by the ASRock stand at CeBIT 2010 and we took a double-takeat a demonstration that highlighted some of the benefits of its X58 chipset-based motherboards.

The news that ASRock's X58 supports the as-yet-unreleased Intel Gulftown 980X six-core chip isn't particularly shocking - most X58 boards will do so with a simple BIOS update. What is, we reckon, is having said chip benchmarking CINEBENCH R10.

ASRock pointed out that it had Intel's permission to do so, and we don't doubt the veracity of the fact, but it seems strange that the chip giant would allow a partner to show performance figures in the middle of a trade show.

ASRock confirmed our suspicions that the six-core, twelve-thread monster, based on the 32nm Westmere architecture, will ship with a base frequency of 3.33GHz. The chip returns a benchmark score of 25,711 CINEMarks. This compares with a quad-core Core i7 975 Extreme Edition's result of around 20,000 CINEMarks, intimating that it will have no problem in claiming the title of world's fastest consumer CPU when it's released later on this month.

The words 'fast', 'new' and 'Intel' in the same sentence usually lead to a wince-inducing etail price. We expect 980X to slip in at no less than $999.

But ASRock had more on show than just a demonstration of Intel's six-core desktop chip. The company's Chris Lee took us through a whistlestop tour of high-end motherboards for both Intel and AMD chips.

Click for more from CeBIT 2010

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