ALi MAGiK 1: The Athlon gets a second DDR platform

VIA is late to the game: Motherboard manufacturers develop amnesia

Most recently, at Fall Comdex 2000, we saw a completely different picture painted for us by the motherboard manufacturers.  With VIA not planning to debut their DDR solution until next year, and many manufacturers staying away from Intel’s 850 chipset until they have a guaranteed belief that demand will surface, there was a demand for a next-generation chipset to provide customers with what they wanted. 

ALi stepped in and, once again, came to the rescue of the motherboard manufacturers.  While VIA had stated that they would debut a DDR solution for the Pentium III before proceeding to do so for the Athlon, ALi had publicly stated the exact opposite to be the goals of their roadmap.

All of the sudden, the manufacturers that had exclaimed back in June that they wouldn’t come near an ALi solution were featuring their ALi based solutions at Comdex.  Our own Motherboard Editor, Henry Kuo, managed to note a total of 11 motherboards based on ALi’s DDR Athlon solution, including Iwill, who was previously ALi’s lone ranger.

The solution is the ALi MAGiK 1 and it’s the second DDR platform for AMD’s Athlon that we will have taken a look at.  Before proceeding further with this review be sure to read our review of the AMD 760 Chipset which contains quite a bit of information pertinent to the understanding of the benefits of DDR SDRAM and the 266MHz FSB.