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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KayKay - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
G70 in second Week of June??! Take That ATI! ;)ryanv12 - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Yeah, it doesn't seem there's enough capacity to make it worth getting one of these. Even if you got 4x1GB, with the cheapest 1GB sticks on newegg costing ~ $80, You're looking at $320 for 4 Gigs. I'm sure there'll be will uses for this, but it's not enough space to put an OS or Games. With that said, I wonder who's going to be the first person to buy two of these, fill them up with 4GB each, and then run a Raid 0 :Pmrwxyz - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#2 and #5you would need a lot of memory to install games and windows or whatver you wanted onto it, and even then its limited to 4 slots. How much memory would you be willing to buy for that? Awsome idea...but i can't see how someone could actually use it (unless u were willing to get 4x1gb modules)...
Dukemaster - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
I think Ati is playing it smart here. I wouldn't be suprised if the G70 is a 24 pipes gpu and when their almost on the shelve then Ati announces it's R520 is a 32 pipe gpu.davecason - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
That Gigabyte DDR RAMDISK looks a lot like an updated/improved version of the Cenatek Rocket Drive:http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm
The advantages are a much lower price and no OS/driver dependency.
mjz - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
#2.. just have a batch file run during the shutdown.. i soo want a solid state drive too!Visual - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
ECS are nutsxsilver - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
$50 for the cpu upgrade card when a whole nforce 4 board can be had for under $100? surely they must be joking.... needs to be nearer $25 to have some real useCrassus - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
if you could put that Gigabyte card in tandem with a harddisk, so that data would be written to the HDD at power-down - or that battery could get a direct connection to a power socket - that would truely transform computing. Imagine having your OS on that one instead of a Raptor :c)Is there any info on its intended availibility for retail?
shabby - Monday, May 30, 2005 - link
Yay g70 :)