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
Tomorrow is the official start of this year's Computex, but as always we were able to get a sneak peak at the show before the floor actually opened.
With the show a day away from starting, we've already seen the first AMD BTX motherboard, a number of NVIDIA G70 graphics cards, an Intel motherboard that can be switched to an Socket-939 board by just purchasing a single card and the first hints of ATI's new multi-GPU chipset.
All of that and more in today's pre-show coverage.
BTX Athlon 64 Motherboard
Intel's BTX standard continues to be fairly unsupported by the motherboard manufacturers we've met with. The motherboard and case manufacturers that we've met with have told us that by the end of this year BTX shipments will account for under 10% of their overall production. By the end of 2006, that figure is expected to rise to anywhere between 15 - 30%. If you're worried about the transition to BTX, you probably won't be forced to migrate until 2007 - 2008.
One concern we have all voiced is the lack of AMD motherboard designs for the BTX specification. Originally we worried that routing would be an issue thanks to the Athlon 64's on-die memory controller, but MSI put our fears to rest by bringing us the first Socket-939 BTX motherboard we've ever seen:
This particular board is based on NVIDIA's C51G integrated graphics chipset and adheres to the microBTX standard.
NVIDIA's C51G chipset - nForce4 + Integrated Graphics
NVIDIA's C51G South Bridge, identical to what is on the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition
The board is due out for release by the end of this year, but it will be an OEM-only solution. MSI is demonstrating a total of two BTX motherboards at the show this year, which is a big increase from last year but in-line with the slow adoption rate we've seen for BTX.
ASUS also had a few BTX motherboards at the show
The move to BTX is an expensive one for case manufacturers; the high costs of re-tooling and producing cases based on a new form factor have kept case manufacturers from embracing the new standard, especially given that ATX seems to be fulfilling users' needs just fine. The case manufacturers won't put much time and money behind BTX without widespread BTX motherboard availability, and motherboard manufacturers won't build BTX boards without widespread case availability. Like many new technologies in the PC industry, BTX presents both manufacturers with the classic chicken and egg scenario.
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ravedave - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
Anand,Benchies, we need benchies and lots of them on the RAM drive. AFAIK there haven't been any good reviews on any RAM drives. I am sure it would pull in some sweet traffic....
Things to try
1) Games (level load times)
2) web browsing (cache on ramdrive)
3) OS (page file, entire install)
4) multi media (scratch file...)
Viditor - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
That Ramdisk is VERY intriguing...Total cost looks to be ~$270 for a 4GB drive ($50 + 4 1024MB PC2100 sticks) and ~$150 for a 2GB drive...
It might even be cheaper if you bought some used low-speed Ram on Ebay!
Brian23 - Tuesday, May 31, 2005 - link
#57, I don't see why they couldn't make a PCIe solid state card that was bootable. bios will already recognize and boot to hard drives on a PCI controller card. A manufacturer could make a PCIe card that was both a IDE controller and a IDE to DDR controller. That way there would be no extra cables or reliance on a seprate IDE controller. Plus there would be all the bandwidth of a PCIe bus for data transfere. (If they do that, I would still want a conector for an external power supply though.)Googer - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#21 Raid 0 with 2, 3, or 4 of these cards would be awesome! Add PCI express x4 so for extra bandwith and keep the sata just so it can be bootable. Once windows starts and loads drivers the SATA Conncetor can take it's break or work in tandem with PCI-E.Zebo - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
everything there is retared cept for that DFI ATI board.justly - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Anand, thanks for the reply, and I will be looking forward to the piece you mentioned.I do understand that SiS (along with other brand chipsets) are not marketed twards the "enthusiast" (if by that you mean gamers). However, I still see little information as to why they are so inadequate, and that is the information I would like to find out instead of just hearing these comments that appear to be indirect slander of a chipset because they are not utilized in high end motherboards and marketed directly at gamers.
Even in the article you linked to (I briefly looked over it as I have read it before) I saw no mention of driver problems (as you hinted twards) and the performance indicates that it competes very well. You say "it is really tough to beat the high end chipset makers right now" but look at the review you referenced to on your own site and you can see that the SiS chipset did just that on more than one benchmark. In fact it only lost to all of the 4 nForce based motherboards twice, but it beat ALL the nForce based motherboards 3 times, the rest of the time it placed between. Given that this review shows SiS as realitively equal in performance when compared to Nvidia, I ask again what are the problems with SiS that make the term "stuck with SiS" more appropriate than something like "limited to SiS"?
Just as a reminder my complaint is that these comments get directed at the chipset not the motherboard. If all nForce chipsets where relegated to ultra low end solutions by motherboard manufacturers that wouldn't make nForce a bad chipset ... would it?
Brian23 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I didn't mean cut the wires to the battery. I meant to take a razor blade and cut the traces on the PCB to the PCI connector and then solder wires to the traces and run them to an external wall cube. It could work, but it would mean damaging the card.I've got plenty of PCI sockets laying around on old AT motherboards. I'm going to take one off and solder a power adapter to the apropriate pins. That way I can power the ramdisk all the time without modifying it.
jiulemoigt - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
an eight gb swap file that accesses at the speed of memory is fast. the limiting factor would be the sata connector, which means you may notice it swapping but nothing even close to a disk find on a mechinal drive. You could even get away with the worst latency ramm {random access memory modules} out there as they would already be waiting on the sata controller. What would be better would be a native interface on the PCI-e 1x channel. Oh an giga byte could not make an always power pci unless they change how the PSU is turned on and off as power goes through the cpu on the 12volt line they might be able to use one of their raiser cards there is a reason mobos don't leave the traces powered. The person who mentioned cutting the three lines to the batter and simply powered them has a good idea but you might want to find out what the draw is first so that when you hook it out you don't fry the whole mobo :)unhaiduc - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
this might be the dumbest idea ever.. but here goes:what if... you get a 2nd case with a motherboard that has 6 pci slots, stick in a 200w powersupply and hook up this 2nd case through a ups
now, get 6 of these pci cards, hook them all up with 4gb of ram.. 6cards x 4gb = 24GB total space
now, to make this all feasible, u'd have to have this second case right next to ur 'main' case so that the sata cables would reach into the main case's motherboard (an nforce4 board has 8 sata's)
of course without a cpu in ur 2nd case, it wouldn't even post.. but the motherboard is powered and so are the 6 pci slots, and a 200w powersupply should last at least an hour even on a cheap ups
you are ofcourse limited by the 150Mb sata, but isnt the raid on the nforce4 chip directly connected to the rest of the chip/system? therefore you could get 4x150= 600Mb/s out a 4disk raid (i dont think u can span across both raid chips of a dfi board)
for the 2nd motherboard, i think even an old 486 mobo should work.. no?
just an idea that popped into my head.. what do u guys think?
Brian23 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I bet it wouldn't be hard to cut the PCI traces on the ramdisk card and use an external wall cube to power it. Or better yet, take a PCI connector off an old mobo and wire it up to an external wall cube.