Introduction

Even before arriving in the bustling streets of Las Vegas for this years Comdex, I knew there would not be any massive surprises so I made plans ahead of time to cover what I felt would hold somewhat of an interest to you. With Intel finally launching the delayed i820 chipset and the shortage of good Athlon motherboards, I figured I would look into what was going on with the motherboard companies to let you know who’s doing what. With all these discussions of AMD not getting the proper support from the motherboard companies, I was determined to see how things were going (or not). There was also much excitement over the upcoming VIA based KX133 motherboards for Slot-A that promises high speed memory (PC133) as well as 4X AGP support. Let us take a look at this years Comdex.

VIA

Before I get into the actual motherboard companies, I wanted to give you a heads up of all the exciting things I found out at VIA Technologies. With the acquisition of Cyrix and Centaur, VIA will be offering a full range of products. From their integrated solutions running the MII to the KX133 running the AMD Athlon processor.

Taking a look at the higher end chipsets we will see the arrival of KX133 based motherboards, which offers PC133, 2 GB memory max, 4 DIMM slots, supports 4 USB ports, AGP 4X and AC97. The release of KX133 is scheduled for the beginning of 2000, so that we should not have to wait for long anymore. From what I hear through the grapevine, AMD is working closely with VIA to make sure the performance of this chipset is optimal. With the addition of all these features, the Athlon based systems take a big jump not only in performance but feature-set. It is only a matter of time before this chipset sees modifications to support DDR memory sometime next year.

VIA’s Apollo ProMedia II for Slot 1/Socket 370 is the incarnation of a work-in-progress project with S3. This chipset will be something like the i810e chipset from Intel that offers a low cost video-integrated solution. However, the Apollo ProMedia II will offer a 4X AGP expansion port so that you could upgrade from the integrated S3-Savage4. To keep costs down for motherboard manufacturers, VIA has made this upcoming chipset pin-compatible with its Apollo Pro133A line. This allows the manufacturers to only make one board-design for both, the high and low cost solutions, which in turn saves them development costs.

Although not too much information was available, we will soon see the arrival of new Cyrix MII processors running a PR rating at over 400. The unreleased Joshua core from VIA will also be making it’s way into socket 370 boards sometime next year. This forthcoming chip will have integrated 256k of L2 as well as the 3DNow! Instruction set. Users will have even more options in the value category of the already crowded market segment.

ABIT

ABIT turned out to be a very interesting story for me when I visited their crowded booth. I was expecting to see their latest offering that sported the i820 chipset as well as some information on their plans to release an Athlon based motherboard. After a brief talk with some of the folks at the front booth, I made my way back to a meeting room for an in-depth discussion. It seems that ABIT was a bit unhappy with AMD being that it had not selected ABIT as an Athlon motherboard launch partner. ABIT went on to explain that it felt tossed aside because it had given AMD a helping hand in the early days of K5 and had not been acknowledged since. Maybe this explains the non-existent support for Super7 on ABITs part. Whatever the case may be, ABIT has decided to work on an Athlon solution but it appears that AMD has decided to give them the cold shoulder. I personally think that there is more to this story than this but speculation won’t bring us Athlon support. I hope ABIT and AMD can settle their differences because the only real losers in this fight are the consumers.

The i820 solutions present at the ABIT booth were the CH6 and CX6, which only differ by the type of memory support. The CH6 will have 3 DIMM sockets for supporting SDRAM. The CX6 will flex two RIMM slots with 600-800 MHz ECC memory support. Both board will also utilize ABITs popular SoftMenu II allowing for jumper less operation.

Lastly, I was surprised by ABITs plans to jump into the graphics card market. It will be carrying a ‘Siluro’ line which is basically a line of NVIDIA based boards. You can expect to see TNT2 based solutions very soon while the GeForce 256 based cards won’t be around until next year Q1.

Delta

I had a really limited time with Delta electronics but I did manage to find out about their two i820 based boards and their stance on Athlon support. The i820 boards are the M82II-X and the MD82-X which have slightly different features. The M82II-X will have support for 2 RIMM/2 DIMM slots and 5 PCI slots. The MD82-X will however differ in each of those features by having only RIMM support (2 sockets) and 4 PCI slots. Once I switched topics to the Athlon, I was told that an engineering sample was made but there are currently no plans to make products at this time. I was told that it will consider it once it feels the market is safe enough for it to enter. I guess Delta will wait until it is so far behind in the race to sell Athlon motherboards that it will no longer be able to jump in. We will have to wait and see.

DFI

After talking a bit with DFI, I learned that there are no Athlon boards being announced at this time but that they did have an i820 based board being released at Comdex. The PC64 is an i820 motherboard with 2 RIMM slots, 1AGP slot, 5 PCI slots, 1 AMR slot and on-board Aureal sound in an ATX form factor. There are really no other special features about the board besides the quality workmanship expected from DFI. Regrettably there were no other products released for me to talk about.

Iwill

Fortunately, I was able to catch up with someone at Iwill and get the scoop on their upcoming products since it was one of the few companies with rare and unique announcements. The information I am speaking of is on their DS133-R (i820 based motherboard), DCA200 (i840 based motherboard) and Slocket II (a Socket 370 to Slot 1 converter). Let me break down each item so that you can better understand why I was impressed.

The DS133-R comes with all the typical bells and whistles for an i820 based motherboard (2 RIMM slots, 4X AGP, etc.) but supports some things that no other i820 motherboard I’ve seen at Comdex have, up to 150MHz bus speed AND dual processing. The board is able to run at 133MHz or 150MHz with an on-board clock generator. I was also taken back when I flashed my eyes upon the dual socket motherboard. With a high speed FSB and dual processing, this motherboard is going to be a killer workstation class motherboard.

One of the few i840 based boards I saw at Comdex is the DCA200 by Iwill. It features the WTX form factor, dual PII/PIII Xeon processors, AGP Pro 50/4X AGP (up to 1.6 GB of bandwidth), 64-bit PCI and a massive 2 GB memory max. If you don’t already know, AGP Pro 50 has the same theoretical throughput as AGP 4X but can provide high-end video accelerators (loaded with power-consuming graphics cores and large texture memory sizes) with up to 50 watts of power. Note the large memory max is due to the availability of 4 RIMM slots on this motherboard.

So what is so special about this «Slocket II» device that Iwill has released? It not only converts current Socket 370 processors and PGA processors but it also supports 2nd generation Coppermine FC-PGA processors. On top of this, the converter will support the upcoming Joshua processors from VIA. The board supports an assortment of settings like FSB and voltage settings through on-board jumpers. The voltage settings available are between 1.3-3.5V which is key for supporting the wide variety of CPUs.

That is all fine and dandy, so what’s Iwill doing for Athlon owners? Well I do not have any official word of a release date or specifications but Iwill is working on an Athlon solution. We will have to wait and see what actually is released before I make any judgments.

Lucky Star

Unfortunately Lucky Star was not very friendly and did not care to share more information than what was available on the floor. There was not any detailed information on their i820 solution available in their product information sheets either. They have a flood of i810e-based boards but nothing too special. There were no comments made on the possibility of upcoming Athlon boards so I am not sure what they are planning for the future.

Micro-Star Int’l (MSI)

I paid a short but sweet visit to MSI as they let me in on their upcoming products as well as a fancy new feature set, Ultimate System Armor III (USA III), that will be making its way into each of MSI new motherboards.

MSI has created a set of devices that will help you protect, troubleshoot, monitor and configure your system. To protect your system, MSI has incorporated a new BIOS design that is partitioned. This gives you a primary and secondary BIOS. The primary will be your regular BIOS as we know it while the secondary will trigger when the primary fails or you force it to load due to a virus problem in the BIOS. Troubleshooting the system just got a bit easier for you because MSI has incorporated something like a debug card into their upcoming motherboards. A set of green and red LEDs will give you the heads up on the status of your system. This allows you to figure out exactly why your motherboard is not posting should you ever run into some posting problems. To monitor your system, MSI provides a software utility to give you access to temperature, power, power savings and other various system statuses. Configuring your MSI motherboard is going to be more flexible in the future thanks to their new CPU PnP feature. You will now be able to alter FSB speed, core/bus ratio, core voltage and IO voltage. With all these settings available, an over-clocker should have a much easier time.

MSI has released 6 flavors of their i820 based motherboards varying from memory configuration to form factor type. I have gathered the motherboards into a table to simplify the product line.

This is a very diversified line-up for i820-based motherboards. You won’t find this many variations from another other company at the moment.

As you already know, MSI already produces Athlon motherboards but does not advertise this on their web page for some strange reason. Unfortunately I did not get to talk with MSI about this during my visit but they did assure me that they will continue to support the Athlon. I will have to dig deeper and to get the full story on this.

TMC

TMC gave me a brief tour of their products and I was able to find two new products to talk about. Unfortunately neither product was an Athlon motherboard but TMC is working on a solution to that. The two released boards are TI6CAI (i820 based) and TI6MAA (i840 based) motherboards. The TI6CAI is a Slot 1 i820 solution with 2 RIMM/2DIMM memory slots and 1 AGP/3 PCI/1 AMR/1 ISA slots in an ATX form factor. As far as the TI6MAA, it has the following: i840 chipset, Slot 1 interface (note this is P!!! and not Xeon), 4 DIMM slots supporting PC100/133, 1394A support and 1 AGP/2 64-bit PCI/4 regular PCI slots all packed into an ATX board. Keep in mind that the Iwill i840 board supports Xeon processors and has an AGP slot that is AGP Pro 50.

Afterthoughts

With Intel’s final release of the i820 mainstream chipset and the i840 workstation solution, the motherboard maker’s support for those new Coppermine-platforms seems to be in full swing. At the same time the Athlon support is still lacking, however.

I am getting a little bit tired boring you with rants about this topic, so that I put my hopes on the release of VIA’s KX133 chipset. If AMD should indeed not have been up to supporting enough motherboard-makers for their Athlon-platform, I hope that VIA will be able and change the situation. If Intel wouldn’t have serious problems with the supply of chipsets as well as processors, Athlon would have an even harder time to catch up once the KX133-chipset is finally released.

Please also read the COMDEX/Fall ’99 — Motherboard Manufacturers Report Part 2