CES 2007: Motherboards and Memory
by Gary Key on January 17, 2007 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Gigabyte: NVIDIA 680i and 650i coming soon
Gigabyte officially announced their GA-N680SLI-DQ6 motherboard that features the NVIDIA 680i chipset with full support for the latest Intel processors and the upcoming 1333FSB units. One of the unusual options on this board is four Gigabit LAN connections that fully support NVIDIA Dual-Net, TCP/IP acceleration, and FirstPacket technologies. The controllers also support the Teaming functionality that enables two sets of 2GB connections to act as a single connection potentially making this board a good choice for a home gateway or game server. The board also features Gigabyte's Quad-Triple Phase system for enhanced power delivery to the CPU. The board includes four e-SATA ports along with Gigabyte's dual BIOS technology. Available is expected shortly, and while pricing has not been set we expect it to be sell in the $250~$300 range.
Also due for release shortly is the GA-N650SLI-DS4 motherboard based upon the NVIDIA 650i chipset. This board is designed to compete with the lower end P965 motherboards and features an all solid capacitor design, Gigabit Ethernet, and Realtek HD audio for a price of around $125 or lower.
Memory: Top Speed Wars while DDR2-800 prevails
With the release of DDR3 capable chipsets in late Q3 or possibly Q4 and minimal market penetration until 2009 we fully expect DDR2 to continue as the dominant system memory type for some time. It should to continue to ramp up in speeds while latencies will continue to be improved in the DDR2-800 range. DDR2-800 will likely become the base memory speed this year and for all intents and purposes this speed combined with low latencies offers the best combination of price and performance for the current processor lineups.
However, the bigger news in memory over the coming quarters will be the release of 2GB modules with low latencies. This will benefit those users switching over to Vista as the operating system recommends (and almost requires) additional memory relative to XP. Recommendations for a general user that does a variety of tasks from video editing to gaming will be 2GB, and enthusiasts or heavy gamer will need 4GB in our opinion. The switch to a 64-bit OS and applications will also increase memory requirements, and hopefully this year we will see Windows x64 platforms mature to the point where users can switch without any concerns about driver maturity or other issues.
DDR2 memory isn't the only big topic for memory manufacturers. We continue to see flash memory products increase in both size and speeds as the MLC and SLC technologies continue to mature. Just about everyone has a full lineup of flash products now with packaging, price, or Vista ReadyBoost capability differentiating the supplier's offerings. Let's take a look at some of the memory offerings we saw at the show.
Our first stop was at Patriot Memory where they were showing off their new PC2-10100 memory that was released right after Corsair announced their PC2-10000. We continue to see the varying memory suppliers competing for the top speed title, but users need to understand these speeds are officially available only on the NVIDIA 680i boards. In our testing we have found the RD600 chipset to offer the same extended memory speeds as the 680i boards. We still believe DDR2-800 memory speeds with low latency timings provide nearly the same or better application performance than the higher latency and memory speeds at significantly less cost.
One of the other recent product releases from Patriot Memory was their excellent Xporter XT USB Flash drive that will soon be available in a version 2 offering read speeds up to 39MB per second. Current models are available in capacities up to 4GB.
Gigabyte officially announced their GA-N680SLI-DQ6 motherboard that features the NVIDIA 680i chipset with full support for the latest Intel processors and the upcoming 1333FSB units. One of the unusual options on this board is four Gigabit LAN connections that fully support NVIDIA Dual-Net, TCP/IP acceleration, and FirstPacket technologies. The controllers also support the Teaming functionality that enables two sets of 2GB connections to act as a single connection potentially making this board a good choice for a home gateway or game server. The board also features Gigabyte's Quad-Triple Phase system for enhanced power delivery to the CPU. The board includes four e-SATA ports along with Gigabyte's dual BIOS technology. Available is expected shortly, and while pricing has not been set we expect it to be sell in the $250~$300 range.
Also due for release shortly is the GA-N650SLI-DS4 motherboard based upon the NVIDIA 650i chipset. This board is designed to compete with the lower end P965 motherboards and features an all solid capacitor design, Gigabit Ethernet, and Realtek HD audio for a price of around $125 or lower.
Memory: Top Speed Wars while DDR2-800 prevails
With the release of DDR3 capable chipsets in late Q3 or possibly Q4 and minimal market penetration until 2009 we fully expect DDR2 to continue as the dominant system memory type for some time. It should to continue to ramp up in speeds while latencies will continue to be improved in the DDR2-800 range. DDR2-800 will likely become the base memory speed this year and for all intents and purposes this speed combined with low latencies offers the best combination of price and performance for the current processor lineups.
However, the bigger news in memory over the coming quarters will be the release of 2GB modules with low latencies. This will benefit those users switching over to Vista as the operating system recommends (and almost requires) additional memory relative to XP. Recommendations for a general user that does a variety of tasks from video editing to gaming will be 2GB, and enthusiasts or heavy gamer will need 4GB in our opinion. The switch to a 64-bit OS and applications will also increase memory requirements, and hopefully this year we will see Windows x64 platforms mature to the point where users can switch without any concerns about driver maturity or other issues.
DDR2 memory isn't the only big topic for memory manufacturers. We continue to see flash memory products increase in both size and speeds as the MLC and SLC technologies continue to mature. Just about everyone has a full lineup of flash products now with packaging, price, or Vista ReadyBoost capability differentiating the supplier's offerings. Let's take a look at some of the memory offerings we saw at the show.
Our first stop was at Patriot Memory where they were showing off their new PC2-10100 memory that was released right after Corsair announced their PC2-10000. We continue to see the varying memory suppliers competing for the top speed title, but users need to understand these speeds are officially available only on the NVIDIA 680i boards. In our testing we have found the RD600 chipset to offer the same extended memory speeds as the 680i boards. We still believe DDR2-800 memory speeds with low latency timings provide nearly the same or better application performance than the higher latency and memory speeds at significantly less cost.
One of the other recent product releases from Patriot Memory was their excellent Xporter XT USB Flash drive that will soon be available in a version 2 offering read speeds up to 39MB per second. Current models are available in capacities up to 4GB.
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syzygy - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Did anyone else notice the solid state capacitors that this mobo will be equipped with - for under 120.00 !!! The 650is have already been shown to overclock rather well and are an infinitely better price-to-performance option than the splashier 680is.Hulk - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Is this a "seat of the pants" recommendation or have you done some testing that shows 4GB to be faster than 2GB for Vista?Gary Key - Thursday, January 18, 2007 - link
We have completed testing in several areas at this time with 4GB being consistently faster than 2GB in several games, Photoshop, Recode (still trying to figure that one out), and a few other desktop applications where we feel the consistency of the benchmark is valid. The issue we have now is consistency of other benchmark scores. In XP we generally see several benchmark runs of the same application not vary over .05%. In Vista the same benchmark differences might vary up to 4%. The patterns do not make sense (high,low,mid,high, mid scores, reboot and it might be low, mid, low, high, high) and we attribute the differences to Vista's caching scheme along with some other possibilities that Microsoft brought up to us.Samus - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
all that graphics power on that northbridge and only that tiny heatsink?mamisano - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Is it me, or are these new C2D mainboard prices totally absurd? I just don't get why people are willing to spend $250+ on a part that is aimed at a crowd of people who constantly upgrade. Are they really worth double the price of i965P based boards?IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
I would think people who can constantly upgrade has much more money to spend than the ones that don't :P.
Most don't need better than P965.
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Where's the newer drivers and benchmarks for it?? Did Intel give up making newer drivers?? The newer drivers should have been out month ago, and the one after that should be out now.Indeed it is, but considering that both the GMA 3000(X3000 core but no new features like T&L,SM3.0) and GMA 950(older core) beat the X3000, there's still much performance to be gained before making conclusions. 690G isn't even out yet for sale.
duploxxx - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
that's true but you know from older days what the x700 was capable off, so you can compare this with other chipsets... and easy to say nore 6150/g965 intels will come near that performance the only thing that will up the performance is the core architecture, the same reason why a compare between G965 and 6150 is in favor of Intel, we'll see if the it is still the case with the new 690, this will sell alot to oem vendors due to sales from the same vendor (byebye many amd nvidia chipsets for oem, probably less influance in retail due to the fact that they also by high end nvidia graphics and will choose the nvidia chipset)btw check the heatsink on the chipsets and compare those with the nvidia ones (and they don't have a grapics inside....) and the intel g965 easy to say nvidia/intel better start working on a chipset that consumes less power.
hint to anand to keep it a litle fair review systems from the same budget...
x2 3800 - whatever netburst
x2 4200 - e6300 / e4300
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
LOL. 690G is nowhere near X700. 690G will probably get close to X700 in games where it requires full SM2.0 to run, but X700 is a significantly more powerful core. 690G has half the pixel pipelines(4), with core clock speed equal to regular X700(400MHz), 1/3 the amount of vertex shaders(2), slightly greater memory bandwidth(12.8GB/s vs. 11.2GB/s for regular X700)that's shared with the CPU, which doesn't even have a crossbar memory system.
http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/hwdb.php?tid=728310&t...">http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/hwdb.php?tid=728310&t...
30-40% faster than GF6150/Xpress 200
It happened before, integrated GPU based off a dedicated GPU coming out to be slower than the slowest dedicated version. Xpress 200, based off X300, doesn't even beat X300SE.
Intel and ATI is pretty close: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2891&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2891&am...
"Our system at stock voltages ran very cool but we did see power consumption increases almost equal the 975X when overclocking both platforms. We will present these numbers along with CrossFire results shortly."
And many enthusiasts overclock, making zero advantage.
MadAd - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
omg, what IS that gargantuan heat pipe array doing stuck to a strip of memory?What is it lately, this is the 3rd ridiculous design ive seen in as many weeks.
If someone (at anandtech preferrably) would go to the trouble of benchmarking this ram before and after removing these ridiculous cooling arrangements I would be very grateful. Personally I think its just spin and glitter for the no sense fat wallet crowd but without testing, its just an opinion however the more and more of these ridiculous designs we see, the more it needs to validated by a forthright site such as yourselves here at AT.