COMDEX/Fall ’99 — Motherboard Manufacturers Report Part 2 — THG.RU

Introduction

I am back once again to give you the low-down on the motherboard scene from the players that didn’t make it into my first Comdex report, COMDEX/Fall’99 — Motherboard Manufacturers Part 1. Although we were able to bring you many of the big players, we still did not feel you saw enough of what was going on so after a bit of digging, we have information from AOpen, Asus, EPoX and Gigabyte. I will overview their newly released products as well as give you an inside scoop on what is going on at each company, if anything.

AOpen

AOpen has recently contacted me to let me know about their newly released products as well as future plans for what is to come. The newcomers from AOpen are the AX6C and AX6C-L motherboards that are both based on the Intel i820 chipset. Both boards feature a Slot 1 connector, 1 AGP (4X but not PRO)/5 PCI/1AMR slot(s), RIMM memory and a FSB that is adjustable from 100MHz to 160MHz. Where the boards differ is in the number of RIMM slots available. The AX6C offers 3 RIMM slots while the AX6C-L offers just two. AOpen feels confident that this board is stable, although Intel finally decided in their last change of the i820-chipset specification, that i820 should support only two RIMMs. AOpen admitted however, that the AXC6 just happens to fail when checked with Intel testing software. It’s up to you to decide if you want to play safe and go for the specified 2-RIMMs-version or for AOpen’s special 3-RIMM-solution. In case of the latter you need to have faith in AOpen. At the same time we should remember that 2 RIMM-sockets restrict you to half a gigabyte for the time that only 256 MB-RIMMs are available or 1 GB once 512 RIMMs will hit the shops. As long as we are talking of close to $1000 per 128 MB I wonder who will be keen on spending the additional $2000 or $4000 to be able and take advantage of the additional 3rd RIMM-slot.

On the Athlon front, AOpen mentioned that their solution, AK72, would be available at the end of December sometime.

Asus

It looks like Asus if roaring into the scene with five i820 based motherboards that are not as diversified as the MSI boards but nonetheless have advantages of their own. Take a look at the chart below.

The table shows that the various features are geared towards having integrated peripherals versus having a variety of memory, socket and form factor differences like the MSI i820 line-up. However, you will notice that all the Asus boards have AGP Pro that is not very common among the i820 boards that I have seen thus far. If you do not recall, AGP Pro or AGP Pro50 is a specification that supports AGP 4X with up to 50 watts of power to the AGP card. Typically this power requirement is important to workstation class video cards that have huge on-board memory sizes. The visible difference is a 1 inch longer AGP-slot that offers the additional power-lines. AGP-Pro is still compatible with the well-known AGP; you can plug every normal AGP-card in it as well. In this case the additional part of the connector stays free.

Another interesting product being produced by Asus is the DR2 DIMM Riser. This little gadget allows you to run DIMMs in a RIMM only motherboard. Take a look:

The board has the Intel Memory Translator Hub (MTH) that makes PC100 SDRAM memory compatible with RIMM only motherboards. We have one of these parts in house and will bring you a report on this very soon. Although this adaptor allows the use of low cost SDRAM modules, going through this added hub degrades performance. Why is that? Let me explain this in very simple terms. When something leaves the CPU heading towards memory, it has these following factors involved:

• You take all the penalties of the translation from the RDRAM to the SDRAM-interface, resulting in a high memory-latency
• You inherit the lower PC100-SDRAM memory-bandwidth (800 MB/s vs. 1,600 MB/s in case of PC400 RDRAM), additionally degraded by the translation-procedure.

With the above explained it is easy to see why applications take as much as a 10-15% real world performance hit. For more information on the MTH, please refer to the Intel CC820 motherboard review. Look for more about this particular product in the very near future.

For our AMD Athlon readers, I am sure you are waiting for me to lay down the dirt on what is going on at Asus with the Athlon motherboards, but unfortunately the only answer I have received from Asus is still, «No comment.» We will keep you posted.

EPoX

It seems that EPoX is keeping a tight lid on their product line, but were nice enough to give me an idea of what they have planned and the dates at which we might see a product. i820-based motherboards will be making their way into the market early next year (Jan ’00) while the Athlon motherboards will be due whenever the VIA KX133 chipset is available (ain’t that a great comment?). This probably is not very good news for Athlon owners but this is a better response than many of the other motherboard manufacturers.

Gigabyte

There is quite a bit going on at Gigabyte these days with the release of i820 and the outcry for Athlon support. Gigabyte seems to have everything under control by releasing a wide variety of i820 boards and sticking close to AMD to produce one of the better Athlon motherboards.

I put together this chart for you to see the various i820 solutions Gigabyte will be releasing. Take a peek:

The release schedule for the GA-6CX and GA-6CXC board is early January ’00 while the GA-6CXDW and 6KXDW7 are due in late February of ’00. You will notice that one of the more interesting boards is the GA-KXDW7 with the Dual FC-PGA (will support Socket370-Coppermine parts) and 2 GB memory max. If only they had included an AGP Pro slot, this would be a killer workstation platform.

Afterthoughts

There are a number of interesting motherboards coming soon to us, based on the various chipsets, and through my talks with the various companies; I have come to a few conclusions.

Although i820 based products are supposed to become the new mainstream motherboard, the main marketing push seemed to be behind the i810e based motherboards. No matter where I went, the i820 platforms seemed to be reluctantly talked about, while much of the attention went to the i810e boards or newer generation BX based platforms. It is almost as if motherboard manufacturers expect that the i820 platforms are going to fail, so they would rather show something that will sell enough to make them money. We also shouldn’t forget that Intel expects the motherboard-makers to sell a lot of i810. It’s an old story that Intel likes to sell their products ‘bundled’. In 1998 motherboard-makers had a strong reason to sell i740-based graphics cards, because they wouldn’t get chipsets unless they’d buy a nice amount of this rather uninteresting 3D-chip. It wouldn’t be surprising if Intel sells i820 and particularly the still very successful BX-chipset only in ‘bundles’ with i810. Now the Taiwanese motherboard-makers would love the press to review their i810 and i810e-products, but who in the retail business really cares about these products? i810e is a 133 MHz-FSB chipset with PC100(!!!)-SDRAM support and integrated i752-‘3D-deccelerator’. It runs Coppermine really well! So well that you wouldn’t even notice that you’ve got a really expensive high-end CPU in your system, because the i810e-chipset makes sure that your system-performance stays mediocre. Poor motherboard-makers! After painful i820-delays, launch cancellation and design recalls, they must be ready to toss their arms up in the air in frustration having to sell slow-motion i810e-platforms or i820-products that just don’t fit into the market right now.

Consumers are going to avoid the i820 boards like the plague. With Coppermine parts and RDRAM at their current pricing and availability, people will not be happy campers paying almost $2,000 just for a CPU, motherboard and memory, when they can get nearly the same thing from a new BX motherboard setup costing less than half that. Even going with an i820 and using PC100-SDRAM with the MCH will be avoided due to the horrible memory performance that it offers at the higher price tag.

Athlon support from the motherboard manufacturers is finally coming around and it should help relieve the need for motherboard support. I know many of you mail us asking what, when and where we will see things happen so I am telling you right now, companies are working on it. The thing to keep an eye out for will be the VIA KX133 based motherboards coming out next year with PC133 and AGP 4X support. With AMD working closely with VIA, things might just come together for Athlon owners.

Altogether we should see exciting issues unfold next year with various chipsets fighting for mainstream and AMD trying to capitalize on what I feel are big mistakes made by Intel. I am extremely interested in seeing how Intel will redeem itself at this point. They know what is wrong and competition is not going to sit around and wait for them any longer.