Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain...
Intel has announced the H370, H310, Q370 and B360 chipsets, paving the way for much-needed cheaper motherboards fo
Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs have generally reviewed well, with their increased core counts, high frequencies and in many cases, extensive overclocking headroom, meaning that they're usually a match for AMD. The Core i7-8700K, for example, can out-fight AMD's eight-core CPUs in many tests, despite only having six cores. However, in the apparent rush to get the CPUs out the door to do battle with AMD, Intel only released one chipset - the high-end, enthusiast orientated Z370, to be used on compatible motherboards.
This posed a big problem and for two reasons. Firstly, motherboards that use the chipset typically cost at least $110, meaning that if you wanted to pair one with one of the company's cheaper CPUs, such as the $110 Core i3-8100, you'd have to spend a lot more than an equivalent AMD system. For example, you can pick up MSI's A320M PRO-VD Plus AM4 board for Ryzen CPUs for just over $60 and for this reason, AMD has been my choice for two out of the three budget system options in my recent PC Hardware Best Buy Guide.
Secondly, the main reason for opting for Intel's Z-series chipsets is that they offer support for overclocking, but if you don't intend to overclock your CPU or want to use one of its multiplier-locked models such as the Core i5-8400, you'll be paying a lot more than you need to. This has certainly meant that despite the excellent benchmark results and keen pricing, Intel's four-core Core i3-8100 and six-core Core i5-8400 have often been poor value compared to AMD's equivalents once you factor in the cost of a motherboard as well.
Today, though, sees four new chipsets arriving for Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs and LGA1151 socket, and they should hopefully shake things up at the low end, offering those with smaller budgets additional options. I've seen pricing for the higher-end H370 motherboards and it's mostly encouraging, with premium models retailing for the same price as the cheapest low-end Z370 boards, so it's likely that motherboards using the H310, Q370 and B360 chipsets will be cheaper still.
It's worth taking a look at the PCI-Express lane counts, though, as some of the new chipsets will only offer limited bandwidth for graphics cards and SSDs. For example, the B360 chipset will be limited to just 12 PCI-E 3.0 lanes, while the H310 chipset looks set to lack support for PCI-E based M.2 storage entirely. Still, at this end of the scale, it's likely some of these cutbacks won't impact on performance, while using an expensive PCI-Express M.2 SSD with a $70 motherboard is probably unlikely too. In any event, this is great news for anyone that doesn't overclock their system or is working with a limited budget.
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