Fall 2004 Motherboard Preview: A Sea of New
by Wesley Fink on June 4, 2004 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
ATI RS480 for AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64
There have been rumors for months that AMD would have a chipset for Athlon 64, and we even saw an ATI chipset for Athlon 64 in a recent roadmap posted at AnandTech. However, we were more than a little surprised to see ULI (formerly ALi and a producer of core logic chipsets) displaying a Socket 939 board for Athlon 64 based on an ATI RS480 Northbridge combined with an ALi Southbridge providing PCI Express.
Click to enlarge.
ULI was also showing an RS480/ALi motherboard for the upcoming Intel Socket 775 and live demonstrations of their on-chip Azalia audio.
Click to enlarge.
While the ULI/Ali solutions were really interesting, ULI is one of the smaller players in the core logic market. This, unfortunately, means that no matter how great the product, ULI/Ali will have a hard time getting their solutions to market with the larger board makers.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
17 Comments
View All Comments
Kaji - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
Cool! Finally a lot of the technologies I have been waiting for!Some disapointments though... how come all BTX boards only have one PCI-E x16 slot? that sucks!
What about those groovy dual PCI-E graphics solutions that are already starting to appear?
Another BTX related question... what about server boards? The excellent article on BTX covered the three desktop form factors... but will there be an Extended BTX form factor for dual CPU? I want to go with BTX, but only if I can have two PCI-E x16 slots... and two dual PCU would be nice!
I wonder when Lian-Li will release BTX case?
rms - Sunday, June 6, 2004 - link
"I was really looking forward to seeing the "extra" performance a user would get on a Nvidia board & card platform. "Could be wrong, but wasn't that advantage only present with the FX series of cards? And involved basically speeding up the effective AGP bus speed? If PCI-X is already 16X, you think any speedups would be miniscule.
rms
Reflex - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
#12: No kidding. But I was referencing the fellow who seemed to think that it was all about performance. SATA is not really any 'faster' than IDE, however it is still an important step forward. PCI-E is similiar in that regard.tmhartsr - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
But - where is the 64 bit OS????XRaider - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
Yea, but still it's a shame that these boards with PCI-E won't be out for another several months! :( It is depressing, but hopefully the 939 FX's will drop far in price by the time these boards are ready to ship mainstream. Hopefully.It still seems like they're draggin their feet on this stuff. :-\
Falco. - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
um.. pci express isn't just for graphics :-)its for every add in card that we presently put in pci slots :-) besides.. for all w know, a x16 pci express slot could do the same thing that going from agp 4x to 8x did.. not much in the performace dept, mainly with video cards being outfitted with 128 megs of ram, and what looks like 256 megs ... have u seen and NV4x and R4xx with 128 megs ?? i can't recall seeing any ....
Reflex - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
#6: PCI-E is not about performance, its about features. More can be done with the interface than can be done with the very limiting AGP. Realize that AGP itself is not really utilized for its performance at all, the 'bandwidth' it allows is nearly useless. Try turning your setting from 8X to 2X and notice the almost complete lack of a performance difference(2-5% approximatly).I, for one, and happy to be rid of the AGP interface. It was a troublesome hack that never lived up to its advertised potential. Bring on PCI-E.
Reflex - Saturday, June 5, 2004 - link
test...Falco. - Friday, June 4, 2004 - link
any thing on Asus and NF3 250 gb/ulta mobos ?? say the k8N-E Deluxe NF3 250 board from asus just with a 939 pin socket ????or something similar from asus ??
jrphoenix - Friday, June 4, 2004 - link
#6... I am just hoping for a slot that won't be obsolete in 1-2 years (how long I want to wait before having to my a new motherboard).If Nvidia is that slow rolling PCI-E out I may just get a VIA chipset & ATI card. I was really looking forward to seeing the "extra" performance a user would get on a Nvidia board & card platform.