Ironically, AMD’s best enthusiast northbridge and best enthusiast southbridge were not launched together. In fact, the company’s flagship chipset—the 790FX—debuted with southbridge technology that’s now two generations old. And the SB750, with its RAID 5 support and Advanced Clock Calibration functionality, emerged alongside the decidedly-mainstream 790GX.

It was only a matter of time before motherboard vendors started pairing the 790FX and SB750 pieces together on boards with more high-end appeal. ASUS’ M3A79-T Deluxe represents one of the first on the market. And at $189, it’s a real stunner. Not only does the board support the Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition (AMD’s lone 140W CPU), it also features a quartet of PCI Express x16 slots wired to run at x8 second-gen signaling rates when they’re all populated. If you’re looking for a board that’ll take four Radeon HD 4850s or a couple of 4870 X2s without any component layout issues, the M3A79-T is a winner. Four DDR2 memory slots help round out the platform’s high-end pedigree by accepting up to 16GB of RAM at speeds as high as 1066 MHz.

Attached to the southbridge you’ll find six SATA 3 Gb/s ports that support RAID 0, 1, and 5. If you’re looking for a compelling value-add, upsell a trio of disk drives and sell your performance machines with the advanced storage mode able to protect against drive failures. But the SB750’s real eye-catcher is the aforementioned ACC feature, which helps power-hungry enthusiasts get better overclocking results from their Black Edition Phenoms. The good news for resellers is that ACC works in conjunction with AMD’s OverDrive desktop software, so if a customer tweaks his PC a little too hard, a reboot should get him back into the driver’s seat without a corrupted BIOS.

Shuttle
X27 Atom-Based Small Form Factor PC: $189
www.shuttle.com

Want a barebones platform that will really stand out from the crowd? Check out Shuttle’s brand-new X27 Atom-based small form factor system. The diminutive chassis is about half the volume of the Shuttle boxes you’re used to—so in other words, it’s tiny. The company is able to cut down so drastically on size as a result of integrating Intel’s Atom 230 processor, which runs at 1.6 GHz and sips just 4W of power. Granted, the little Atom isn’t going to win any performance benchmarks. After all, it was designed to drive portable Internet devices. But it’ll still get the job done in a productivity machine, all while saving lots of energy.

The Atom 230 drives a motherboard armed with Intel’s 945GC chipset. Though it centers on older core logic technology, the 945GC is more than enough platform to compliment the CPU. Onboard GMA 950 graphics offer DirectX 9 compatibility and enough 3D muscle to fully accelerate Windows Vista’s Aero interface. A single DDR2 memory slot takes up to 2GB of 533 MHz memory—plenty for such a lightweight machine.

Intel’s ICH7 delivers the I/O connectivity, consisting of dual SATA connectors, four USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and 5.1-channel HD Audio. Again, the ICH7 is an older piece of silicon, but for what the X27 is designed to do, the platform and processor work well together.

This isn’t a play on blazing speed, snappy graphics, or multi-core computing. Rather, it’s an easy way to get reasonable Vista-ready performance into a three liter chassis without using much power, generating much heat, or creating noise. Best of all, the CPU comes pre-installed—just add memory and storage.

Samsung
SSD SATA 3.0Gbps 2.5” 64GB: $799
www.samsung.com

By now you’ve likely read about solid state hard drives and the performance, power, and noise advantages they offer. Conversely, you’re also probably aware that solid state drives are substantially smaller than conventional disks based on magnetic platters. They’re also quite a bit more expensive, and for the most part, still out of reach for mainstream customers.

But for those with the means to enjoy solid state storage today, the benefits apply to notebooks, desktops, and servers alike. Samsung’s newest SSD SATA 3.0Gbps 2.5” 64GB (yes, that’s its name) makes for a great upsell in any of those markets. On the road, its optimized memory controller helps save power. And because it doesn’t employ any moving parts, the drive is particularly durable. Forget worrying about the bumps and drops that’d normally destroy a traditional notebook hard drive. In a desktop environment, Samsung’s SSD is all about performance. Sequential reads as fast as 100 MB/s and sequential writes of up to 80 MB/s are accentuated by near-instantaneous access times. If you haven’t yet used an SSD, try one out for yourself—the speed-up in response is palpable. Finally, there’s the solid state drive’s application to enterprise environments. In enclosures with a lot of drives, an active power rating of .41 W helps save huge amounts of energy. And an MTBF of 2 million hours speaks volumes to the drive’s reliability.