Fall 2004 Motherboard Preview: A Sea of New
by Wesley Fink on June 4, 2004 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
DFI LANParty 925X-T2 and Asus P5AD2 Premium
Intel 915 chipset boards were everywhere at Computex, but the 925X - the Enthusiast version with support for DDR2 only - was harder to spot at Computex than a day without thunderstorms in Taiwan. Two of the most interesting 925X boards to target the high-end were at DFI and Asus.
Click to enlarge.
DFI has won over many hard-core Enthusiasts with their LANParty series and the new 925X-T2 is a Socket T version for the LANParty Series. This LANParty finally adds Firewire to the package, along with Dual Gigabit Ethernet and the exciting 8-channel Karajan Audio.
Click to enlarge.
Among the major manufacturers, Asus is always watched for their high-end boards that always attract the attention of hard-core enthusiasts. Asus will not likely disappoint with their new p5AD2 Premium. The feature set includes just about everything that you could ever think of for a desktop PC, like both Firewire 1394B and 1394A, theater-quality 8-channel audio at 192Khz/24bit, Dolby Digital Live, dual gigabit LAN, built-in WiFi-G for a high-speed wireless network, and triple RAID that even can support RAID 5.
Asus has also addressed many of the heat issues with the newest Prescott chips very aggressively, including a new CPU cooling device called "Stack Cool" on the back side of the motherboard.
If you look closely at the Asus and DFI boards, you will see 4-phase power regulation, which we saw on almost all of the new Socket 775 boards. With over 100 watts needed for the new Prescotts, 4-phase power appears a must to deliver stable power to the CPU.
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Kaji - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Cool! Finally a lot of the technologies I have been waiting for!Some disapointments though... how come all BTX boards only have one PCI-E x16 slot? that sucks!
What about those groovy dual PCI-E graphics solutions that are already starting to appear?
Another BTX related question... what about server boards? The excellent article on BTX covered the three desktop form factors... but will there be an Extended BTX form factor for dual CPU? I want to go with BTX, but only if I can have two PCI-E x16 slots... and two dual PCU would be nice!
I wonder when Lian-Li will release BTX case?
rms - Sunday, June 6, 2004 - link
"I was really looking forward to seeing the "extra" performance a user would get on a Nvidia board & card platform. "Could be wrong, but wasn't that advantage only present with the FX series of cards? And involved basically speeding up the effective AGP bus speed? If PCI-X is already 16X, you think any speedups would be miniscule.
rms
Reflex - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
#12: No kidding. But I was referencing the fellow who seemed to think that it was all about performance. SATA is not really any 'faster' than IDE, however it is still an important step forward. PCI-E is similiar in that regard.tmhartsr - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
But - where is the 64 bit OS????XRaider - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
Yea, but still it's a shame that these boards with PCI-E won't be out for another several months! :( It is depressing, but hopefully the 939 FX's will drop far in price by the time these boards are ready to ship mainstream. Hopefully.It still seems like they're draggin their feet on this stuff. :-\
Falco. - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
um.. pci express isn't just for graphics :-)its for every add in card that we presently put in pci slots :-) besides.. for all w know, a x16 pci express slot could do the same thing that going from agp 4x to 8x did.. not much in the performace dept, mainly with video cards being outfitted with 128 megs of ram, and what looks like 256 megs ... have u seen and NV4x and R4xx with 128 megs ?? i can't recall seeing any ....
Reflex - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
#6: PCI-E is not about performance, its about features. More can be done with the interface than can be done with the very limiting AGP. Realize that AGP itself is not really utilized for its performance at all, the 'bandwidth' it allows is nearly useless. Try turning your setting from 8X to 2X and notice the almost complete lack of a performance difference(2-5% approximatly).I, for one, and happy to be rid of the AGP interface. It was a troublesome hack that never lived up to its advertised potential. Bring on PCI-E.
Reflex - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
test...Falco. - Friday, June 4, 2004 - link
any thing on Asus and NF3 250 gb/ulta mobos ?? say the k8N-E Deluxe NF3 250 board from asus just with a 939 pin socket ????or something similar from asus ??
jrphoenix - Friday, June 4, 2004 - link
#6... I am just hoping for a slot that won't be obsolete in 1-2 years (how long I want to wait before having to my a new motherboard).If Nvidia is that slow rolling PCI-E out I may just get a VIA chipset & ATI card. I was really looking forward to seeing the "extra" performance a user would get on a Nvidia board & card platform.