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
BTX Motherboards
The last bit of interest at the show were two BTX motherboards that we saw on display.
Foxconn's picoBTX board is seen below:
You can see that the layout is significantly different from what we're used to with ATX. Moving the memory slot out of the way definitely cleans the board layout up considerably.
FIC also had a picoBTX board that we took a look at, the layout of which was understandably similar to the Foxconn board:
We were particularly intrigued by the fact that we didn't see more BTX boards on display, it does not bode well for a quick transition to BTX. Couple that with lower than expected initial demand for Intel's 9xx series of chipsets and this is beginning to sound more like an AMD friendly 2004.
Final Words
For us, it's on to the show. There's so much more to talk about that we haven't touched yet, including follow ups to everything we've discussed here already. Check back, because we're expecting to have much more information in the next 24 hours....
It's good to be back at Computex.
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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.