[Discuss] mini-ITX boards for Haswell CPUs

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Richard Pieri)]

Tom Metro wrote:
> so in theory you could plug it into a mother board designed to supply
> higher voltages and it would regulate down to the level the CPU requires.

Well, no. An Ivy Bridge board has a power regulator in the support
chipset. If you wired a Haswell CPU to an Ivy Bridge board you can end
up with weird power conflicts. And if you wired an Ivy Bridge CPU to a
Haswell board there won't be any power regulation for the CPU.


> So I don't think it was power supply incompatibility that led to the
> need for a new socket specification.

Not the primary reason, anyway. Moving chipset functions to the CPU
itself requires different wiring anyway.


> They should still list the DAC specs, and even if they said "see CPU for
> GPU specs" it would still make it clear that the board facilitated
> onboard graphics.

It doesn't. Connection to a DVI, DisplayPort or HDMI device is just a
pass-through from the GPU. No digital to analog conversion is involved
until the signal is in the display device which has its own DACs for
signal processing. On-board DACs are for connecting analog displays and
analog audio devices that don't have their own DACs.

4Kx2Kx24Hz? That's the highest resolution currently supported by HDMI.
It has absolutely nothing to do with DACs or DAC quality.

Can the three ports drive three displays simultaneously? Yes.
Per-display resolution is dependent on how much memory is allocated to
the GPU. An interesting quirk -- and I don't know the reason why -- is
that the three ports cannot all be set to HDMI or DVI but they can all
be set to DisplayPort.

-- 
Rich P.