Computex 2004 Early Bird Coverage: NV45 in the Flesh, New Chipsets, BTX Boards and more...
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 31, 2004 12:31 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
ASRock puts Two Sockets on Motherboards
ASRock is displaying an interesting board that caught our eyes; the K8 Combo board features both a Socket-939 and a Socket-754 socket. Astute AnandTech readers will know that Socket-754 Athlon 64s only have one Hyper Transport link and thus cannot support multiple processors, so something must be up. Indeed the K8 Combo isn't a multiprocessor board, rather its a motherboard that can support either a Socket-939 CPU or a Socket-754 CPU, but not both. The flexibility offered by the board is interesting, as it provides a decent upgrade path for current Socket-754 users, granted it may be a bit extreme.
This does not appear to be the only multi socket transition motherboard planned by ASRock; a Socket-775/Socket-478 board is also in the works.
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Chuckles - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
It just makes some people's $150 cases become obsolete faster.I just find it funny that a pico (10^-12) BTX is larger than a nano (10^-9) ITX.
Also, what's up with the 24-pin + 4-pin power connectors?
GI2K - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Nice to see that MB based on the intel 9xx with AGP8x,PCI Express 16, DDR and DDR2, a must have for those that want to upgrade slowly...Xentropy - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
#7 - These are PicoBTX boards, meant for desktop rather than tower systems. So if you just think of the front of the desktop case as being on the right side of the board, with the board laying down in the bottom of the case, it isn't really upside-down.Just curious, what is "stupid" about moving the motherboard to the other side of a tower case? Doesn't seem to really change anything to me.
Araemo - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Hrm.. On motherboards with PCI-express and AGP...Will both be enabled at the same time in the bios? Will windows be able to handle both at once?
/me has dreams of dual head x800 + his current 9700 pro.. or would that be quad head?
I know it wouldn't be much use for gaming, but I LOVE high res + ultra high refresh rate, so I need decent cards to drive the big screens.
AtaStrumf - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Interesting stuff. Keep it comming :)Nighteye2 - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Interesting...but with the memory and the Athlon 64, there's one thing I really want to know: will the dual core Athlon's AMD is planning have dual memory controllers, too? Given the stellar memory performance of dual-opteron systems under a UMA-enabled OS (Longhorn will be UMA-enabled), it would certainly make sense to give each core it's own memory. And if they upgrade the memory controllers to support QBM by that time...>:)sprockkets - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Oh, and aren't those pico BTX motherboards upsidedown? One of the stupidest features of BTX is the fact that the case now opens on the right side, not left. So if it was facing right the I/O ports should be on the left, not right.sprockkets - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
Yeah, but is that board from Asrock dual channel with just 2 slots? The only real advantage I see to getting a 939 processor is the fact you can have 2 more slots of memory.ZobarStyl - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
man that x600 is just silly...PCI-X and a mem clock boost isn't going to change the fact that it's only a 9600XT...anyone getting a PCI-X board is going to want to actually use that extra bandwidth for something worthwhile...at least, I hope so.thatsright - Monday, May 31, 2004 - link
A great initial article to whet everyone's appetite. And it's nice to see Anand back writing again.