Computex 2005 Day 2 - ULi's new Athlon 64 Chipset, G70, CrossFire & more
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 1, 2005 1:57 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
ATI CrossFire Motherboards
Although most of the CrossFire demos running at the show were running on ATI Reference Boards, other manufacturers did have their boards on display.
ASUS is only making an Intel CrossFire board, pictured below:
DFI has a particularly impressive AMD CrossFire board; even ATI was surprised that they had it up and running with so little time with the chipset. Note the lack of any legacy Parallel or Serial ports:
Although it was covered by a heatsink, DFI will try to use ATI's South Bridge for their motherboard because of pressure from ATI.
Gigabyte's AMD CrossFire board still uses a selector card like the nForce4 SLI boards in order to cut costs:
Note the use of the ULi South Bridge on the Gigabyte board above.
Last, but not least, MSI had their AMD based CrossFire board on display as well:
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erwos - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
Quick question for you, Anand: when you say DDR200 in reference to the i-RAM card, do you mean PC3200 or PC1600?It would seem to make zero sense to use PC3200 RAM, when the PCI bus is already limiting you to 133mb/s anyways. I hope they're using low-clocked RAM (makes more sense!), which is cheaper anyways...
I guess there's some latency differences, but at the nanosecond range, who's going to notice?
-Erwos
ryanv12 - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
#4 - Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I want to upgrade my processor but would like to hang onto my 6800GT for a while. I hope that board makes its way to the US, because it would be a perfect solution for me.bersl2 - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
lol on ABIT's nuke button.Oh joy, DRM rears its ugly head again.
erwos - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
So, does this mean the Shuttle SN26P got cancelled? Damn.semo - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
if the nvidia g70 card is a single slot solution than the rumor that the g70 will burn 150w cannot be true right. anyone know what is the actual power rating for the g70?mjz - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
lets see some real world tests done with the gigbyte ram drive :pplewis00 - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
That all looks quite exciting, the thing which caught my eye was the Pentium M XPC. I wonder now if Shuttle do one they'll get it right (Aopen's was cool but no SATA support...). Anyone know the model number for it?flatblastard - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
congratualtions=congratulationsflatblastard - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
Whew, that's was a lot of coverage, anand! I'll have to admit though, I was more interested in the vanilla Xpress 200 motherboards than crossfire/r520/g70/blah/blah/yawn.....Did you happen to notice any new Xpress 200 + socket 939 mobos? Even if you didn't have a chance to cover them, I'd be interested to know if you've seen/heard anything new. Well, congratualtions on another job well done.SynthDude2001 - Wednesday, June 1, 2005 - link
That ULi chipset/motherboard with support for both AGP and PCI-Express really caught my eye. It would be a nice upgrade path for those of us still stuck with slower CPU's (Athlon XP in my case), but not quite ready to upgrade our high-end AGP video card yet (6800GT in my case).