Computex 2005 Early Bird Coverage: NVIDIA's G70, Athlon 64 BTX and more
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 30, 2005 8:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Switch from Intel to AMD on the same motherboard?
ECS’ PF88 Extreme H is another interesting board we happened to encounter at the show. By default, it is a SiS based Pentium 4 motherboard with two PCI Express x16 slots.
But note the pink connector in between the two PCI Express x16 slots:
If you remove the jumpers along that connector, the connection between the South and North Bridges is severed and redirected to pink slot. You can then install an ECS branded upgrade card in the pink slot to convert this Pentium 4 motherboard into:
A Pentium M motherboard:
A Socket-754 Athlon 64/Turion 64 motherboard:
or a Socket-939 motherboard:
The upgrade card features new memory slots, a new socket and a new North Bridge. How’s that for flexibility?
There are some limitations to the technology; first and foremost, you are stuck with SiS chipsets. Secondly, the clock generator is on the actual motherboard itself, and thus the FSB frequencies supported by the board are limited to what the on-board clock gen can support. In this case, the clock generator can support 800/1066MHz FSBs for Intel platforms, and up to 1GHz Hyper Transport for AMD platforms.
With the card installed, the on-board CPU socket and North Bridge are no longer used.
Also, whenever you purchase an upgrade card it will come with a new BIOS chip that you will have to install on the motherboard. There is an unpopulated BIOS socket on the motherboard for this very purpose.
ECS estimates that the upgrade cards will retail for around $50.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
80 Comments
View All Comments
michaelpatrick33 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Or, you could put a whole Linux distribution on that and have some fun!Of course another drawback is that it is a 32bit PCI card, so you will only get a maximum of 133mBps sustained to the south/north bridge thus limiting it further. Still way faster than any hard-drive though.
AndreasM - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Ah yes, use a ramdisk for the swap file so the computer doesn't slow down when swapping data to it from ram. Or not.#17 has a point though, this would be useful for Intelists that have moved to DDR2 and still have their old DDR-sticks around. Though it would probably be a better idea to just sell those sticks and buy more DDR2 :P
stevty2889 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#12 I think using that gigabyte ram drive for the swap file would be an excelent use for it, good idea!Icehawk - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I want that RAM-Disk. Here's why - I have a gig of older DDR ram that is essentially worthless. How about using the Ram-Disk for your virtual memory swap file? Ah... now you see the possible benefit?:)
Tanclearas - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I thought the idea behind BTX was to improve cooling through better air flow. Why would they place the IDE cables directly in-line with the CPU, and the power and SATA cables all nearly in-line with the CPU?!Matthew Daws - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
What I don't quite get with the solid-state drive is: Why not just increase the amount of ram you have, and let the O/S use it as it sees fit, either for a huge disk cache, or for applications if they need it. This should actually be faster, as the OS can intelligently decide what data to buffer in ram; and with 64-bit nearly mainstream, you don't have a 4GB limit.The only issue might be that you'll have to spend a lot more on RAM you want to put on your motherboard than the dirt-cheap stuff you'd put on the Gigabyte board; but surely 2GB of extra system ram would be better than a 4GB Ram-Drive?
mjz - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
yea, maybe if they have 8 slots and ram is 50 dollars a gig.mattsaccount - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
The solid state drive would also be useful for photoshop/video editing scratch disks, or for the windows page file.MDme - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
hey, you can put winXP onto that ramdisk and just have that. I mean if you use that as your OS partition, it will rock. maybe use a minimal XP install without the bloat-ware...maybe even a 512mb swapfile there. (I wonder how fast will boot times be???)OR
just use the ramdisk as the swap file. that would still be a boost. (you won't have to worry about the volatile ram either)
AnnihilatorX - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
2GB should be enough for just Windowbut if you want "a" game on it... 4GB is just enough