Q4 Motherboard and Graphics: Tour de Taiwan
by Kristopher Kubicki on November 2, 2005 10:14 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
MSI
Gigabyte
The board that immediately caught our eye at Gigabyte was their new 975X board with a radically new cooling design. Rather than rely on the chassis to generate enough airflow over the Northbridge and mosfets, Gigabyte decided to condense and remove some of the legacy devices from the I/O backports and use that space for small, powerful fans instead. These fans draw air over the core logic and mosfets via a plastic tunnel system, and then exhaust where we are typically accustomed to seeing PS/2 or other legacy device outputs. Such a design is good for cooling, but your ears may not approve.
Gigabyte is already working on 945GM/GT and will likely become the first to the retail channel with motherboards. Intel’s Mobile on Desktop (MOD) doesn’t seem to have much support from other manufacturers, although everyone likes to talk about it. Gigabyte, on the other hand, is clearly putting its money where its mouth is. While AOpen and DFI are traditionally the only vendors to bring MOD products to market, Gigabyte seems ready to embrace MOD as well.
Gigabyte’s Quad graphics motherboard stirred up a lot of attention over the last few weeks. In fact, once Gigabyte heard that Matrox has plans for a triple-headed PCIe graphics card, the thought of twelve displays on a single motherboard made even the most senior engineer drool.
Click to enlarge.
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Gigabyte
The board that immediately caught our eye at Gigabyte was their new 975X board with a radically new cooling design. Rather than rely on the chassis to generate enough airflow over the Northbridge and mosfets, Gigabyte decided to condense and remove some of the legacy devices from the I/O backports and use that space for small, powerful fans instead. These fans draw air over the core logic and mosfets via a plastic tunnel system, and then exhaust where we are typically accustomed to seeing PS/2 or other legacy device outputs. Such a design is good for cooling, but your ears may not approve.
Click to enlarge.
Gigabyte is already working on 945GM/GT and will likely become the first to the retail channel with motherboards. Intel’s Mobile on Desktop (MOD) doesn’t seem to have much support from other manufacturers, although everyone likes to talk about it. Gigabyte, on the other hand, is clearly putting its money where its mouth is. While AOpen and DFI are traditionally the only vendors to bring MOD products to market, Gigabyte seems ready to embrace MOD as well.
Gigabyte’s Quad graphics motherboard stirred up a lot of attention over the last few weeks. In fact, once Gigabyte heard that Matrox has plans for a triple-headed PCIe graphics card, the thought of twelve displays on a single motherboard made even the most senior engineer drool.
Click to enlarge.
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unclebud - Monday, December 5, 2005 - link
wondering what's the requirement to go on a tour or at least get an asus pinZoomer - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
Does that mean that we'll soon be seeing sub $100 ATi boards?
Wow! I'm definately buying one if that's the case.
Btw, dual x16 slots are overrated. Will it be possible to use a x1 or x4 card in a x16 slot?
KristopherKubicki - Saturday, November 5, 2005 - link
Yes and Yes.
Kristopher
vailr - Friday, November 4, 2005 - link
Just curious: has Apple made a determination yet, which company will be making their new Intel CPU based motherboards? Has the chipset been pre-determined as being "Intel only", or could NVIDIA, ULi, ATI or VIA chipsets still be a possibility for Apple's new x86 CPU based architecture?That is: the official Apple products, to be released in 2006.
BigLan - Thursday, November 3, 2005 - link
Does this comment mean that nvidia have stopped working on intel boards? If so, when did this happen?"When NVIDIA was still on board with Intel, 975X Yonah would have meant an SLI Pentium M desktop, but now it looks like we’ll just have to settle for a Crossfire MOD board instead."
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, November 3, 2005 - link
No. NVIDIA is actually going to get more agressive with Intel boards. It just means there won't be any Yonah based SLI motherboards except the one ECS is working on -- that we know of anyway....Kristopher
stmok - Thursday, November 3, 2005 - link
ASRock had a few other unique products on display, including those wonderful ULi based boards. The yellow riser on this motherboard is actually for a Socket 754 expansion card. ASRock also had M2 socket kits available, but since M2 will require DDR2, we weren’t exactly sure how that riser would work.How it works is: the Northbridge, CPU and DDR2 memory slots will be on the CPU upgrade
card. The jumpers will tell the mobo to use the stuff on the CPU upgrade card.
Think of the jumpers as a junction thingie on train tracks, a flick on a switch will
shift you to the next line over.
So all you do is...
(1) Buy an ASRock mobo now (on with the CPU upgrade slot...The yellow slot)
(2) When Socket M2 arrives, buy the Socket M2 CPU upgrade card, your prefered
Scoket M2 CPU...It doesn't matter what it is : Sempron, A64, A64 X2, Opteron 1xx
series AND some DDR2 RAM.
(3) Set the jumpers on the mobo according to manual, point it to use CPU upgrade
card.
(4) Install CPU, HSF and DDR2 RAM on upgrade card.
(5) Install upgrade onto mobo.
(6) Turn on and fingers crossed... It should work. :)
yacoub - Thursday, November 3, 2005 - link
What's the ETA on that silently-cooled 7800GT?? That is EXACTLY what I want for my next build! I bet it doesn't come out until next year! :( :( :(yacoub - Thursday, November 3, 2005 - link
Actually while we're at it, what's the ETA to the A8N32-SLI Deluxe hitting store shelves as well?I'd love a passively cooled motherboard and GPU since those two items tend to have the smallest, noisiest fans. I can barely imagine the joy of cutting out those two noise sources and just having a CPU fan and the PSU fan. mmmmmm!
KristopherKubicki - Thursday, November 3, 2005 - link
http://labs.anandtech.com/search.php?q=A8N32-SLI+D...">http://labs.anandtech.com/search.php?q=A8N32-SLI+D...Soon soon :(
Kristopher