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

We also got a shot of the backside of the board, to show the heatsink mounting. The heatsink is not fixed to the board itself, but to strong metal plate. This solves the problem of motherboards bending due to the mounting pressure of the heatsink, which is indeed an issue with P4 boards.

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At this CeBIT, we could finally see a wide choice of dual Athlon motherboards, thanks to the availability of the AMD 760MPX chipset.

Intel

Intel presented the Xeon MP (for multiprocessor) on CeBIT. In contrast to the normal Xeon, which only supports dual CPU configurations, the Xeon MP allows more than two CPUs to coexist in a system. The maximum clock speed of the Xeon MP is currently 1.6GHz - since it is still based on the old "Foster" core, and produced in 0.18µm circuit size. It features an additional on-die 512KB or 1MB L3 cache.

More relevant for end users is that many motherboard manufacturers presented motherboards based on the Intel 845 chipset at CeBIT. The 845 is Intel's latest Pentium 4 chipset ith DDR SDRAM support. Especially interesting is the version with integrated onboard graphics, the 845G. This is Intel's chipset with the highest performance 3D features so far - it will be very interesting to see how this chip set performs compared to ATIs and NVIDIAs new chipsets with onboard graphics, once the first boards make it to the desks of the reviewers in a couple of months.