Chinese motherboard maker ONDA released the first Intel Socket LGA1700 motherboard that features both DDR4 and DDR5 memory support—something we learned quite early on that Intel either isn't allowing or is "discouraging" motherboard vendors to do. The ONDA H610M+ is based on the entry-level Intel H610 chipset, and is an otherwise basic-looking motherboard. The memory sub-system is interesting.

While the board supports both DDR5 and DDR4, there's only one of each slots, so you're limited to single-channel, and like every motherboard from the past that supported multiple memory types; you can't use the DDR5 and DDR4 slots at the same time. The board runs DDR4 at a maximum frequency of DDR4-3200, and the DDR5 slot at DDR5-4800 (max). That's not all, the board is quite possibly the only H610 chipset-based motherboard with a Gen 5 PCI-Express x16 slot (every other H610 board we've come across has Gen 4, to keep costs low). PCIe Gen 5 is allowed for the H610 platform. Another interesting bit is the M.2 E-key slot, so you can drop in a WLAN module. It's likely that this board will only be available in the Chinese market.

Chinese motherboard manufacturer that specializes in high cost-performance motherboard, ONDA, is working on a micro-ATX motherboard based on the Z77 chipset. Its pictures made it to the press. The board mostly sticks to the chipset's feature set, except using an additional PCIe-PCI bridge that gives out two legacy PCI slots. As a Z77-based motherboard, it should support both overclocking and Smart Response SSD caching. The LGA1155 socket, which supports today's Sandy Bridge and tomorrow's Ivy Bridge processors, is powered by a simple 4+1 phase VRM. It is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, supporting dual-channel DDR3 memory.

All of the chipset's SATA ports are wired internally, including two SATA 6 Gb/s and four SATA 3 Gb/s. The board provides four USB 3.0 ports, two on the rear panel, two via header, all four are wired to the PCH. Apart from the two legacy PCI slots, we have one PCI-Express 3.0 x16 and one PCIe 2.0 x1. Display outputs include DVI, D-Sub, and HDMI. 6-channel HD audio and gigabit Ethernet make for the rest of the connectivity.

This just had to happen. NVIDIA wanted GeForce GTX 550 Ti to have higher memory bandwidth, while keeping costs low. So it populated its 192-bit GDDR5 memory interface with mixed density memory modules (that's 4x 1 Gbit, and 2x 2 Gbit) to get 1 GB of standard memory size. Chinese motherboard and graphics card specialist ONDA, which primarily sells in the East Asian markets, decided to populate the 192-bit interface with all 2 Gbit modules. The result is 1536 MB (1.5 GB) of memory.

The ONDA X-Engine GTX 550 Ti has a upper-mainstream look to it, with 1536 MB of memory, a high-performance cooler that uses a large 6-heatpipe heatsink, cooled by two 80 mm case fans, 4+2 phase VRM with POSCAP capacitors, and overclocked speeds of 1000 MHz core, 2000 MHz CUDA cores, and 4.40 GHz memory. To support the increased power demand, the card draws power from two 6-pin power connectors. Display outputs look to include one each of DVI, D-Sub, and HDMI. It isn't very likely that ONDA will sell westwards.