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Motherboard Preview From Comdex

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the if-everybody-had-a-motherboard dept.

adpowers writes "Anandtech has a large preview of upcoming motherboards shown at Comdex." P4s dominating Athlons, lots of DDR SDRAM boards. A quite lengthy article. The FIC pages have several interesting looking PCs, I dig the AquaPad, a WinCE Transmeta box.

7 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Will these boards solve Linux' problem? by fishebulb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    i have to disagree with linux requires a lot of maintance. This is from my more limited experience but i have run a 10-20 computer network with routing, webserver, database, and printing. At times i forget about the server because its working so well. Then i will do a dist-upgrade and install a new kernel, and it will reboot and work perfectly again. This computer was built with spare parts in my basement. Its also named "Timmy" (from southpark) for a reason ;)

  2. Still holding my breath by skroz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Still holding my breath for a dual P4 board, and I'm starting to turn a little blue. From what I have learned, the P4s that exist today are not SMP capable, and only Xeons will support multiprocessor configurations. Pity. I was starting to get used to cheap dual systems.

    Looks like I'll have to have the 440 line and room cooler installed in my den before I can have a dual AMD system...

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  3. What I checked in that article... by Papineau · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There's 4 photos that I was very interested in, because I plan to replace my P2B-D w/ PII-400 with a dual Athlon solution RSN: Some questions (apart from the official release date, or more importantly the "in stock" date) sprung to my mind after checking some of those photos:
    • Why do the Abit doesn't seem to have USB ports? Or is it rather the PS/2 ports that are missing? (Check the upper right corner)
    • Again on the Abit, on the bottom left, there's a PLCC (or another Quad side package) that's empty. Do any of you know if they usually show working motherboards, or rather engineering samples that may do nothing?
    • The ASUS is the only one with a full-blown heat-sink (w/o fan) on the North bridge, the other ones only have a heat spreader. For the look only or more stable operation?
    • On the Gigabyte, what kind of ports are in the upper center part? Firewire ports? And again, there's only one set of ports at the top (either USB or PS/2). I find it quite strange.
    Fortunately, all of those motherboards are equipped with mounting holes for the CPU heatsinks. Now to find some quite quiet HSF to go with that pair of MP 1600+...
    1. Re:What I checked in that article... by Geek+In+Training · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The ASUS is the only one with a full-blown heat-sink (w/o fan) on the North bridge, the other ones only have a heat spreader. For the look only or more stable operation?


      Depends entirely on the chipset. My ECS Athlon board sporting a nice SIS735 (combined North and Southbridge chip with DDR support, $57 for the board!) doesn't even require a heatsink according to spec, but I got one anyways. Just another place to put the corporate logo! ;)

      The VIA 266 series seem to want a fan. The AMD 760MP series and Intel i850 (Rambus) both need big honkin' HSF units on them.

      My understanding is that stability only comes into play if you're trying to overclock the FSB. Once you get a couple of MHz over spec, you may want to upgrade to a bigger heatsink and/or fan to compensate for the extra strain on the Northbridge.

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      SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a .sig, someone WILL complai
    2. Re:What I checked in that article... by Papineau · · Score: 2, Interesting

      My question was more on the comparison of the 4 motherboards I linked to. They all use the AMD 760MP chipset, or at least for the North Bridge (information in Anand's article is rather scarce on which SB are used (AMD or VIA)). So given that it's the same chip underneath, why ASUS put a HS on top of it while the three others only put a heat spreader?

      I don't really plan to overclock (well, maybe like 135-140MHz), so probably any one of them will react the same as far as the NB is concerned.

      My personal taste was with the ASUS, but my final decision will depend on the date I will be able to grab any of those, the price at that time, what kind of HSF can be fitted on top of the CPUs and what are the integrated components (RAID, sound, etc.).

  4. hopefully by Raven42rac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    these new mobos will hasten the arrival of serial data and higher bus speeds, because we are on the verge of breaking moore's law. Also, one of the biggest problems is making smaller chips that run cool enough to be worthwhile.

    Insert Sig Here.

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  5. nForce...? by Sodakar · · Score: 2, Interesting
    All these posts, and not a single one about the highly anticipated nForce?

    From: AnandTech's article:

    Unfortunately NVIDIA's nForce has not been met with such great enthusiasm by motherboard manufacturers. The five launch partners for the nForce are still dealing with various issues in their designs in spite of the fact that NVIDIA's reference boards have been running just fine.

    As a person who is eagerly awaiting the nForce to be released, I have a question... Can anyone think of why it's taking so long for the manufacturers to make a working nForce mobo when the reference mobo works just fine? Also, why are they so non-enthusiastic about this otherwise good-looking chipset?

    The only two things I can think of are:

    1. The nForce and its unique read/guess-ahead SSE cache, dual-channel memory pipes, high-speed Southbridge pipe, and DMA addressing make it difficult to build further optimized boards and drivers.
    2. Unlike the obviously non-performance-oriented Intel 810 all-in-one, the nForce all-in-one can be made to be a cheap all-in-one solution for $500 PC's, but an alternate design can be used for high-end PC's -- thus, the motherboard manufacturers are having to make more motherboards than normal off of one chipset.

    Um... like I said, these are just guesses... anyone else?