Computex 2005 Early Bird Coverage: NVIDIA's G70, Athlon 64 BTX and more
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 30, 2005 8:53 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Switch from Intel to AMD on the same motherboard?
ECS’ PF88 Extreme H is another interesting board we happened to encounter at the show. By default, it is a SiS based Pentium 4 motherboard with two PCI Express x16 slots.
But note the pink connector in between the two PCI Express x16 slots:
If you remove the jumpers along that connector, the connection between the South and North Bridges is severed and redirected to pink slot. You can then install an ECS branded upgrade card in the pink slot to convert this Pentium 4 motherboard into:
A Pentium M motherboard:
A Socket-754 Athlon 64/Turion 64 motherboard:
or a Socket-939 motherboard:
The upgrade card features new memory slots, a new socket and a new North Bridge. How’s that for flexibility?
There are some limitations to the technology; first and foremost, you are stuck with SiS chipsets. Secondly, the clock generator is on the actual motherboard itself, and thus the FSB frequencies supported by the board are limited to what the on-board clock gen can support. In this case, the clock generator can support 800/1066MHz FSBs for Intel platforms, and up to 1GHz Hyper Transport for AMD platforms.
With the card installed, the on-board CPU socket and North Bridge are no longer used.
Also, whenever you purchase an upgrade card it will come with a new BIOS chip that you will have to install on the motherboard. There is an unpopulated BIOS socket on the motherboard for this very purpose.
ECS estimates that the upgrade cards will retail for around $50.
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justly - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
61 Jarred thanks for letting me know why you have reservations about using SiS, but can you really say that the reasons you pointed out are deal breakers for 10% or even 1% of the 115,727 users registered to Anandtech forums?Not providing drivers for a beta OS, complaints of long term stability of a cheaply manufactured motherboards, or a "feeling" that you have doesn't effect my choice of chipsets (no matter what brand) but if I hadn't asked about the reference to being "stuck" with a certain chipset, I might have had second thoughts (if I didn't take it upon myself to find out more).
Believe it or not, I don't do this to persuade people to buy SiS chipsets. I do this to prevent people (including myself) from unknowingly being persuaded to avoid a potentially good chipset for their needs (I would do this for any chipset brand if I thought they where being misrepresented).
EODetroit - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Hey, you guys aren't getting what I'd use that RAMDRIVE for.I play World of Warcraft (WoW). I like to PvP. When I run into one of the huge zerg fights, my computer stutters as it thrashes the hard drive while it loads the files into memory of all the extra players around me.
With one (or two, since the WoW game files take up about 4.5GB) RAMDRIVE, I'll then have a batch file that copies all the game files from my hard drive to the RAMDRIVE. I run the game off the ram drive, and now every file access takes place near-instantly. I can run into a huge melee and not notice any disk accesses and while everyone else is suffering, I'm killing away.
Actually I've already found the perfect solution, but I'm unwilling to drop $3550 on it. http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&...
:/
I've emailed that guy to sell it to me (a lot) cheaper but he just won't budge :/ .
knightwhosaysni - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Everyone here seems to be talking performance. This seems to me much better as the basis of a silent PC with no moving parts, 2GB of OS and a Gb link to a file server.BigandSlimey - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
I'm no electronics engineer, but wouldn't it be easier to unplug that cable that runs from the battery pack into the pcb, modify the termination and connect that to an external power supply?Anand, please tell Gigabyte to put such a feature in as standard!!
I wonder if this product can achieve the same benchmarks as the CENATEK rocket drive.
http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Storage-Devices/CEN...
http://www.cenatek.com/store/category.cfm?Category...
If it does, it would certainly put CENATEK out of business considering their product is around 30 times the price :S
cartman - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
correction:sales=sells
cartman - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
where can we buy the ramdisk pci? i cannot find anything about it in gigabyte's site. It would be very interesting for somebody like gigabyte to create a ramdisk that fits on a 5 1/2 bay and has pre-installed the most dirt cheap ram chips one can find! i think a 300$ 8-16gb disk is entirely feasible for a company that buys mass quantities of ram chips. add some batteries and the ability to run from the 5volts the psu provides when the pc is shut down, and you have a product that sales like hot cake!Viditor - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
A question for Anand...In the article, you state:
"Gigabyte has introduced a number of interesting add-ons for their motherboards"
Does this mean that the Ramdisk will be a Gigabyte-only item?
All knowledge gratefully accepted! :-)
Calin - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Level load times for games won't be too much affected by ramdrives - they are mostly processor bound, not disk bound.However, ramdisk for swap would be great (maybe not that great as more RAM, but more RAM has its own problems, like price, the DIMMs must match, they are high speed so they are expensive).
ceefka - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Please ditch BTX and go ahead on CTX. We need lots of slots for those SSDs :-DVery good work with the Xilinx Spartan FPGA. These things are so useful. Nice one, Gigabyte.
I am not sure if the PCI-slot is the best location for an SSD in the future. It looks perfect for today.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
55 (justly again) - Part of the problem, at least from my perspective, is the lack of a unified installation package. NVIDIA, Intel and VIA all have chipset driver installation packages that are mature and let you know that everything is installed. SiS driver installation always leaves me feeling like I may not be getting everything.Performance is only part of the equation, and while SiS does keep up and surpass other chipsets in some situations, that's not the same as being better than the chipsets. How quickly did SiS get out 64-bit capable drivers? How about drivers for beta OSes like Longhorn? (I can tell you from experience that sound on many SiS boards doesn't work under Longhorn.) There's an overall package that you get with a motherboard, and the SiS boards almost always feel "less" than Intel/NVIDIA/VIA boards that I've used.
That can change, of course, but I have yet to use an SiS solution that was as stable in long-term use as an Intel board. Was it the chipset or the cheaply made motherboard? I can't say for sure - maybe both. Anyway, for another comparison, you can look at the Foxconn e-bot in the SFF roundup I did a few months ago.
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=23...