Computex 2004 Early Bird Coverage: NV45 in the Flesh, New Chipsets, BTX Boards and more...
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 31, 2004 12:31 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Not launched, but everywhere: Intel's 9xx Chipsets
Although Intel isn't actually launching anything at the show, you'll find more Intel based motherboards on the floor than anything else. We found this to be quite interesting, especially after hearing how many problems motherboard manufacturers have had with the 915 and 925 chipsets thus far.
The majority of the problems seem to reside with the 925X and its support for DDR2 memory, which has been through numerous revisions.We believe that the 925X being shown off at Computex is the fourth incarnation of the chip, which is pretty bad for Intel, especially considering that even in its current revision the chipset does not support ECC - a planned feature for the chipset.
The other complaints we've been hearing about from motherboard manufacturers involves Intel's LGA-775 socket. Since the pins have been moved off of the CPU and onto the socket itself with the LGA-775 interface, motherboard manufacturers have been reporting extremely high failure rates with those sockets. The pins on the socket itself are spring-loaded, and installing a CPU obviously causes the springs to compress. What seems to be happening however is that after a handful of CPU installations, the springs don't want to spring back to their original position - resulting in premature socket failures. The problem does seem to be a solvable one, but we'll have to wait and see what the motherboards we get our hands on are like. You better believe that we'll be testing socket reliability as soon as we get LGA-775 boards and CPUs in house.
The other complaint we've been having is that of bent pins on the socket, but just like bent pins with CPUs, that seems unavoidable.
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Chuckles - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
It just makes some people's $150 cases become obsolete faster.I just find it funny that a pico (10^-12) BTX is larger than a nano (10^-9) ITX.
Also, what's up with the 24-pin + 4-pin power connectors?
GI2K - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Nice to see that MB based on the intel 9xx with AGP8x,PCI Express 16, DDR and DDR2, a must have for those that want to upgrade slowly...Xentropy - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
#7 - These are PicoBTX boards, meant for desktop rather than tower systems. So if you just think of the front of the desktop case as being on the right side of the board, with the board laying down in the bottom of the case, it isn't really upside-down.Just curious, what is "stupid" about moving the motherboard to the other side of a tower case? Doesn't seem to really change anything to me.
Araemo - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Hrm.. On motherboards with PCI-express and AGP...Will both be enabled at the same time in the bios? Will windows be able to handle both at once?
/me has dreams of dual head x800 + his current 9700 pro.. or would that be quad head?
I know it wouldn't be much use for gaming, but I LOVE high res + ultra high refresh rate, so I need decent cards to drive the big screens.
AtaStrumf - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Interesting stuff. Keep it comming :)Nighteye2 - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Interesting...but with the memory and the Athlon 64, there's one thing I really want to know: will the dual core Athlon's AMD is planning have dual memory controllers, too? Given the stellar memory performance of dual-opteron systems under a UMA-enabled OS (Longhorn will be UMA-enabled), it would certainly make sense to give each core it's own memory. And if they upgrade the memory controllers to support QBM by that time...>:)sprockkets - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Oh, and aren't those pico BTX motherboards upsidedown? One of the stupidest features of BTX is the fact that the case now opens on the right side, not left. So if it was facing right the I/O ports should be on the left, not right.sprockkets - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Yeah, but is that board from Asrock dual channel with just 2 slots? The only real advantage I see to getting a 939 processor is the fact you can have 2 more slots of memory.ZobarStyl - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
man that x600 is just silly...PCI-X and a mem clock boost isn't going to change the fact that it's only a 9600XT...anyone getting a PCI-X board is going to want to actually use that extra bandwidth for something worthwhile...at least, I hope so.thatsright - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
A great initial article to whet everyone's appetite. And it's nice to see Anand back writing again.