Today Intel joins overclockers by giving them the option of overclocking on their very own desktop boards and who would have ever thought such a thing? TweakTown take a look at the Intel's D975XBX2 or Bad Axe 2 motherboard which was originally intended to be the flagship board for the Core 2 Quad. Here's a bit:

We have seen that Intel has put some very small overclocking features in its original Bad Axe board, but simply not able to compete with the more prominent motherboards on the market from the big Taiwanese brands. Intel has really taken a big step into the overclocking world with some real positive results. The Bad Axe 2 motherboard is not only laid out in what we would consider a extremely efficient fashion, but its features and performance results really speak for themselves. We can only hope this isn't a one time thing from the CPU giant and they keep on this kind of overclocking support and quality in the future.

- Pros
- Efficient layout
- Good performance and as stable as a rock
- Supports a decent overclock for the first time!
- ATI Crossfire support
- Extra PCI-E x16 slot for third graphics card
- 4 port Marvell PCI-E SATA controller

- Cons
- Higher FSB than 433MHz would be nice but a good start
- Not a very exciting feature-set but workable