CeBIT 2002 Part 2 - CPUs, Cooling, Motherboards, & Video

DFI

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DFI's AD76 RAID is a KT333-based board with a very complete configuration: Six PCI slots, four DDR SDRAM sockets, onboard IDE RAID and LAN using a Realtek Fast Ethernet chip.  Also note the passive heatsink on the north bridge. This motherboard should be capable of reading the CPU temperature from the on-die sensor of the Palomino; additionally, it also features an NTC that allows temperature monitoring of older Thunderbird CPUs without the on-die sensor. This is a very good solution; however it remains to be seen whether the reading of the on-chip thermal diode actually works, once the board makes it on the desk of the reviewers.

The most interesting thing at the DFI booth was not displayed to the public, but shown only in a back room: A running 845G-based motherboard. Almost all motherboard manufacturers showed 845G motherboards, but DFI were the only ones to show a running board, so that the 3D features of the 845G could be judged. The computer with this board was running side-by-side with a similarly equiped PC with a GeForce4 MX 440. Both PCs were running Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The game didn't run quite as smooth on the 845G's integrated graphics core as on the GeForce, but it came very close - DFI stated that once the drivers for the 845G were more mature, the performance could be identical. This remains to be seen; but even in the current state we can say that the 845G's integrated graphics core is far superior to previous to the graphics cores on previous Intel chipsets.

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Unfortunately, there's no Linux/Xfree86 support for the 845G's graphics core yet - but this might change in the future as well.