Intel Developer Forum Fall 2002 - Day 2: Live at the Technology Showcase

Intel's Enthusiast Motherboard

Intel had an interesting motherboard on display - a Pentium 4 solution based on an upcoming chipset for the enthusiast market. Traditionally Intel has only made very stable motherboards, but that were generally undesirable to the enthusiast community because of their lack of features. Intel has heard the wake up call and has since started making their own enthusiast class boards and you can tell them apart by their black PCB instead of the conventional green.

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The boards still meet all of Intel's standards and should be just as stable as their other OEM solutions, but with a few more features.

The I/O panel of this board should give you good idea of some of the features that this board should offer. From left to right we have 2 PS/2 ports, a cluster of 1 IEEE-1394 port and two USB 2.0 ports, the usual parallel and serial ports, both digital and analog 6 channel audio outputs and finally 10/100 ethernet as well as two more USB 2.0 ports.

Analog Devices drives the 6-channel audio on this board with their AD1980 codec.

Lucent (Agere) provides the IEEE-1394 support.

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Silicon Image's controller provides two Serial ATA channels and offers RAID support for the motherboard as well.

Believe it or not, Intel may actually offer overclocking options on their motherboard in addition to the features mentioned above. Unfortunately the support would only come through a software utility made by a third party but it's a step in the right direction. If Intel would add some serious overclocking features to the board it could spell trouble for many of the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers; even as it is, this Intel board is quite tempting as no one has been able to match their stability when it comes to motherboards.

Final Words

Tomorrow is our final day here at the show and we've still got worlds of information to give you so stay tuned.