Motherboards in 2001 Preview: Part 2

As we mentioned, Gigabyte was one of only two manufacturers that we saw demonstrate a working Pentium 4 motherboard. The GA-8TX, pictured above, was the board Gigabyte used. It supports Pentium 4 processors and up to 2GB of RDRAM. It features an AGP Pro slot, 5 PCI slots, and one CNR slot.

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The above is the GA-7AM, Gigabyte's Socket-A DDR solution using the ALi MAGiK1 chipset. It supports AMD's 200/266 MHz FSB processors and 2GB of DDR SDRAM. That 2 DIMM limit rears its head again as far as attaining the 2GB limit of the chipset. The 7AM is a micro-ATX board, but we expect a standard ATX version to come along soon as well. Besides the GA-7DX (AMD 760 chipset) and the GA-7AM (ALi MAGiK1 chipset), Gigabyte also has DDR for Socket-370 processors. The GA-6RX is a standard ATX board featuring 4 DIMM slots for a total of 2GB DDR SDRAM, an AGP Pro slot, 5 PCI slots, and an AMR slot. The micro-ATX version, known as the GA-6RM, features just 2 DIMM slots.

At the Gigabyte booth, we also spotted the GA-6OXE, which features the new Intel i815EP chipset. The i815EP chipset is similar to the i815E chipset, except that it does not have the integrated i752 graphics. Therefore, it should bring down the price of the motherboard for those that won't be using the integrated video anyway (ie most AnandTech readers). The price differential is not known at this point, but it will likely be relatively small.