Computex 2004 Early Bird Coverage: NV45 in the Flesh, New Chipsets, BTX Boards and more...

Not launched, but everywhere: Intel's 9xx Chipsets

Although Intel isn't actually launching anything at the show, you'll find more Intel based motherboards on the floor than anything else. We found this to be quite interesting, especially after hearing how many problems motherboard manufacturers have had with the 915 and 925 chipsets thus far.

The majority of the problems seem to reside with the 925X and its support for DDR2 memory, which has been through numerous revisions.We believe that the 925X being shown off at Computex is the fourth incarnation of the chip, which is pretty bad for Intel, especially considering that even in its current revision the chipset does not support ECC - a planned feature for the chipset.

The other complaints we've been hearing about from motherboard manufacturers involves Intel's LGA-775 socket. Since the pins have been moved off of the CPU and onto the socket itself with the LGA-775 interface, motherboard manufacturers have been reporting extremely high failure rates with those sockets. The pins on the socket itself are spring-loaded, and installing a CPU obviously causes the springs to compress. What seems to be happening however is that after a handful of CPU installations, the springs don't want to spring back to their original position - resulting in premature socket failures. The problem does seem to be a solvable one, but we'll have to wait and see what the motherboards we get our hands on are like. You better believe that we'll be testing socket reliability as soon as we get LGA-775 boards and CPUs in house.

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The other complaint we've been having is that of bent pins on the socket, but just like bent pins with CPUs, that seems unavoidable.