Asus
At Asus I had once more the opportunity to meet with almost all of the VPs as well as the CEO, Jonney Shih. I was able to discuss technology as well as their latest product strategy, which I always enjoy, because all the Asus officials are very knowledgeable and helpful.
Asus has started another new venture. After Asus has been successfully moving into the high-end 3D graphics market, after supplying notebooks, barebone servers, DVD/CDROMs/CD-RWs and communication devices like e.g. cable modems, I was not surprised to see that they will now start to go in the IA (information appliances) market as well.
Asus is considering to producing PDAs in several variations as well a web pad. Today Asus has become a brand that’s well received in the whole world and the latest thing to have in one’s portfolio is IAs. The products in the above picture will take a while until they are available and it might be that we won’t ever see some of them, in case that there shouldn’t be enough interest for those products.
You all know about Asus GeForce2 graphic card line, starting with the ‘V7700 Pure’ without any added features and ending with the ‘V7700 Deluxe TV’, sporting video-in and video-out, stereo glasses and a TV tuner module. HC Hung, the father of Asus 3D-cards is very proud of the development of software that enables MPEG2 time shifting on all V7700 cards that come with video-in/out. It enables you to record TV/video in DVD-quality, interrupt the playback while your recording and turning the playback back on, which then will continue where you stopped, while the recording continues in the background. We received a special test system in our Computex-Lab and are currently evaluating this nifty new feature.
In the motherboard area, the traditional core business of Asus, we could find the obligatory i815/Solano boards for Pentium III and KT133 boards for AMD’s new Athlon/Thunderbird and Duron processors.
Here we see the ‘A7V‘:
The A7V is Asus’ Thunderbird/Duron motherboard with VIA’s Apollo KT133 chipset. It comes with AGP-Pro slot, AC’97 compliant 3D audio and an additional UltraDMA/100 controller chip from Promise, which adds two ATA100 IDE channels to the two ATA66 IDE channels that come with the VIA 686 south bridge. We have received a sample in our Computex-lab and are currently testing it.
Asus, Continued
Next in the list is the ‘CUSL2‘:
This is a motherboard with Intel’s upcoming i815E/Solano2 chipset, which is going to be officially launched on June 19, 2000. The board is equipped with 2 CNR-slots for LAN/HPNA/modem/audio or USB adapters as supported by Intel’s new ICH2 south bridge that comes with i815E. You might remember that i815/Solano comes with integrated 3D decelerator, so you can place an AIMM (AGP inline module) into the AGP-slot to upgrade this onboard graphics with 4 MB PC133 Z-buffer (Intel calls it ‘display cache). If you don’t care about that you can plug your own AGP-card into the AGP-slot instead. Of course the CUSL2 comes with two ATA100 IDE channels, as supported by all i815E motherboards.
Two more motherboards were interesting as well. First there is the ‘CUC2‘:
This motherboard with Intel’s unlucky i820/Camino chipset supports RDRAM only, for the ones who still believe in the Rambus hype. It’s equipped with Intel’s new ICH2 south bridge, so that you will find two CNR-slots and two ATA100 IDE channels as well.
Asus, Continued
Finally I’d like to show you the ‘CUSI-FX‘ low-cost solution:
The CUSI-FX uses the SiS630 super-integration chipset with included 3D sound, 3D graphics and LAN. It’s a very interesting platform for low-cost office computers. You only need to add the processor and memory and you’ve got a complete system.
Last but not least I’d like to show you AsusTeK’s AP1300R 1U-server, which is a very interesting solution for ISPs.
This cool unit is using ServerWork’s LE chip, supports dual ultra-2/ultra-160 SCSI channels and 5 SCA-2 hot-swap bays. With up to 4 GB of ECC registered DIMM SDRAM, two Pentium III processors, LAN and an intelligent cooling solution this super flat units are ready to host your website.
RioWorks
You might not be too familiar with RioWorks right now, but there’s a very good chance that this name will soon be established amongst the well-known motherboard makers in the world.
RioWorks merged with the large OEM supplier Arima last year, which made some 1.2 billion dollars revenue in 1999 with their server and workstation solutions. Therefore RioWorks is acting from a rather healthy financial background.
Paul Shay, who’s in charge of RioWorks has got big plans. He wants to establish his company as the number one motherboard provider for dual-processor platforms. He is not afraid of the world’s toughest markets in Japan and Germany, where people have particularly high quality expectations. I was rather impressed by MR. Shay’s visions, who is not interested in providing cheap stuff, but top quality products. Basically he is planning to replace the Supermicros and Tyans from the past and become the Asus of the dual-CPU motherboard arena.
I’d like to show you a few RioWorks motherboards here. Let’s start with the ‘SDVIA‘, which has already been selling very successfully in the Japanese market:
The SDVIA is a dual FC-PGA motherboard with VIA’s Apollo Pro133A chipset. It’s supporting 2 GB of PC133 SDRAM vs. the 1.5 GB recommended by VIA and comes equipped with ATA100 RAID, 10/100 Mbit LAN, AGP-Pro slot, hardware monitor and full ACPI-support, plus RioWorks Smartwatch server management software. I consider this motherboard as an interesting solution for high-end home users and SOHO. We will test it as soon as possible and see if it can live up to the high claims of Mr. Shay.
Besides this high-end home/SOHO solution I’d like to present you a rather kewl platform for professional servers, the ‘SDRCB‘.
This huge motherboard is using the RCC Champion 3.0LE chipset, which supports up to 4GB ECC PC133 SDRAM and PCI64/66. You can see the three 64-bit 66 MHz PCI slots, dual Ethernet, dual ultra-160 SCSI and onboard ATI graphics. The DIMM sockets are tilted so the board fits into 1U server housings.
Besides those two boards RioWorks is also offering sinlge-processor motherboards with all the common chipsets as well as quite a range of other dual-CPU motherboards.
LeadTek
When you hear ‘LeadTek’ you think 3D-graphics and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. However, besides a really wide range of 3D-cards, LeadTek is also making motherboards, IDE and IDE RAID controllers, video and surveillance systems as well as communication devices, like e.g. video phones or GPS systems.
TV devices that only need to be hooked up to a VGA monitor are another area of LeadTek’s vast product range.
I will still focus on the graphics area now. First of all LeadTek is starting to use a new cooler with its GeForce 2 GTS products as you can see below.
Another different version of a GeForce 2 card is LeadTek’s WinFast GewForce 2 GTS with 64 MB.
This card is coming with another large cooling solution. We have this card in our Computex-Lab and are testing it for you right now.
Computex Testing Lab
We didn’t want to announce it too early to catch everyone by surprise. This year Tom’s Hardware Guide is proud to announce that we are the only publication that has a testing facility right here in Taipei, where we can supply you with product reviews without any delay. You can expect several reviews of hot new products this weekend still. Stay tuned as our series of Computex reports continues …
Follow-up by reading the article ‘Computex 2000 Final Words‘.
