Motherboard Preview From Comdex

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.

Comments

nice guys finish last

[joel8x]

"...most manufacturers are not willing to get on Intel's bad side by supporting a controversial (or as Intel would say, illegally produced) chipset that offers no real advantages over the aforementioned two"

This just shows that in tough times, the rich get richer and strip the balls out of the companies that support them. I miss the late 90's.

Motherboards with Good Looks

[PbHead]

Im still waiting for the Windowed Case thing to catch on. Everybody seems to want a Cool Windowed Case like the Modified PC60. But what about the motherboard thats showing through the window?

Sure some of the new Mobos with the trouble or post/boot LEDs by the ATX block are cool and all, but I'd like to see some real wowers. Like Holographic logos or images, LEDs in the fans that make cool effects, something that reminds me of a sequential flashing dilithium containment chamber, or just some cool colors on the mobo showing off it's sections or pathways. Anything would be better than the normal old motherboard sitting there, looking all blah.

In short, I want better use of a windowed case than just seeing if my fans are still spinning.

Re:Motherboards with Good Looks

[archen]

That seems more like a case for people who actually keep their computers clean. About the only advantage of that, that I could see would be the ability to watch your Athlon burst into flames in reasonable safety.

Re:Motherboards with Good Looks

[fobbman]

Awhile back AOpen came out with a motherboard that was black and the chipset heatsink was gold-plated. Very sharp.

While many of the motherboards out there are sticking with classic green, there are some that are still using black. AOpen has a line of motherboards that are black with silver, and my favorite Soyotek has a cool black board with purple PCI controllers and yellow RAID connectors. The Dragon can be found here.

Re:Availability

[ostiguy]

Dude, what would the point of a trade show be if you were going to see stuff that is available? Thats like going to a strip club where all the dancers are ex-girlfriends.

ostiguy

What I checked in that article...

[Papineau]

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:

• Abit's WA2A
• Asus's (AM266-D?)
• Gigabyte's GA-7DPXDW
• MSI's (MS-6501?)

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+...