New Gigabyte mb + Matrox P690 PCIe x1 update
 

This is an update on a new Gigabyte X38T-DQ6 (1.1) motherboard and Matrox card we've been using for a few days now with Cineform HD material. Since some people are thinking of building new systems, this might help them chose.

We bought this particular Gigabyte mb for it's future 45nm CPU compatibility, 1600 FSB and dual PCI Express x16 (electrically!!). First impressions are:

This is a little hard to evaluate as we changed to XP Pro x64 with this new ws, but for what's it's worth:

This motherboard is very fast and stable at "normal" (non overclock) speeds. Much faster (with the same quad cpu as another Intel workstation mb) on renders. I'm sure the fast FSB and DDR3 also have much to do with perceived and real increases, but simply rendering in AE is much faster. This could be also due to the x64's optimization of the quadcore, I'm sure.

It scrolls quickly and nicely through the timelines , much better than our Matrox setup with Intel mb. Both have the same RAID 0's, so that's not the issue.

Negatives: we had to take part of the stupid copper mb cooler off the bottom to put on a big Zalman cooler (our Rosewill on the other quad is much better I think). The part under the CPU doesn't do frit that I can see and is just for looks. The rest of the heatube scheme is very nice and works well.

The EVGA (NVidia) 7600 GT (256 MB of DDR3) we stuck on it, seems to work well with dual monitors and we've had no probs with the newest (Dec) drivers and the probs some of those cards have with CF.

Matrox P690 PCIe x1 update:
we ganged this new little card with our Parhelia AVPe and have been pleased so far with the results. It seems to have offloaded the Parhelia for scrolling and playback, but the biggest thing is that we can easily output our work area to a third monitor or projector or both. Though we could do that with the Parhelia, this makes things a lot easier now and we can also easily use the new little card for the dual LCD, while using the Parhelia for our HD output as either component or DVI. This really wasn't a possibility with just the Parhelia.

Since we haven't tested the new Gigabyte board with PP3 or anything else, this is just a first impression, but overall we're quite pleased with these items.