CES 2006: Motherboards, Memory, Cooling, and a Few Surprises
by Wesley Fink & Jarred Walton on January 11, 2006 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
DFI
The most significant new item at DFI could not be photographed, since it is still under NDA. We can, however, tell you that DFI will be producing a top-end ATI RD580 Socket 939 motherboard for dual x16 Crossfire. This time around, DFI is using the excellent ULi M1575 south bridge with competitive USB performance and SATA2 3Gb/sec with full support for NCQ. DFI expects to ship the new RD580 at the time of the ATI launch in mid to late February.
On display at DFI were two new microATX boards based on the ATI and nVidia integrated graphics chipsets.
At the top is the DFI Socket 939 board based on the ATI RS482 (Xpress 200) chipset. The bottom board is Socket 754 featuring the nVidia 6100 chipset.
DFI also plans one more revision to their just-released nF4 Expert. The new board will provide further improvements to the overclocking capabilities of their nF4 Expert.
MSI
MSI has been relatively quiet of late, so we were curious to find out whether they had anything interesting to show us.
Like most other Tier 1 manufacturers, MSI is working on a 975X motherboard, the 975X Platinum. Features are comparable to what most other 975X boards are including, with the only noteworthy addition being Dolby Master Studio certification for the audio. The socket 939 based K8N Diamond Plus is similar in many ways to the 975X board: it's a dual X16 SLI board, and once again, special attention has been given to the integrated audio. A Creative Audigy SE 7.1 chip is integrated onto the motherboard, which should be better than most other onboard solutions. MSI has also used a heatpipe cooling arrangement for the chipset, which should help to accommodate longer graphics cards.
MSI was also showing products other than motherboards, including a variety of ATI and NVIDIA based graphics cards, but there wasn't much new in that area. We know that both ATI and NVIDIA are working on their next generation products, but we don't have anything that we can discuss or any images to show at this time. We did get a picture of MSI's HTPC barebones unit, pictured above. Since this is the Consumer Electronics Show, it should come as little surprise that virtually every motherboard-related company was showing some form of home theater device.
The most significant new item at DFI could not be photographed, since it is still under NDA. We can, however, tell you that DFI will be producing a top-end ATI RD580 Socket 939 motherboard for dual x16 Crossfire. This time around, DFI is using the excellent ULi M1575 south bridge with competitive USB performance and SATA2 3Gb/sec with full support for NCQ. DFI expects to ship the new RD580 at the time of the ATI launch in mid to late February.
On display at DFI were two new microATX boards based on the ATI and nVidia integrated graphics chipsets.
At the top is the DFI Socket 939 board based on the ATI RS482 (Xpress 200) chipset. The bottom board is Socket 754 featuring the nVidia 6100 chipset.
DFI also plans one more revision to their just-released nF4 Expert. The new board will provide further improvements to the overclocking capabilities of their nF4 Expert.
MSI
MSI has been relatively quiet of late, so we were curious to find out whether they had anything interesting to show us.
Like most other Tier 1 manufacturers, MSI is working on a 975X motherboard, the 975X Platinum. Features are comparable to what most other 975X boards are including, with the only noteworthy addition being Dolby Master Studio certification for the audio. The socket 939 based K8N Diamond Plus is similar in many ways to the 975X board: it's a dual X16 SLI board, and once again, special attention has been given to the integrated audio. A Creative Audigy SE 7.1 chip is integrated onto the motherboard, which should be better than most other onboard solutions. MSI has also used a heatpipe cooling arrangement for the chipset, which should help to accommodate longer graphics cards.
MSI was also showing products other than motherboards, including a variety of ATI and NVIDIA based graphics cards, but there wasn't much new in that area. We know that both ATI and NVIDIA are working on their next generation products, but we don't have anything that we can discuss or any images to show at this time. We did get a picture of MSI's HTPC barebones unit, pictured above. Since this is the Consumer Electronics Show, it should come as little surprise that virtually every motherboard-related company was showing some form of home theater device.
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semo - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
am i the only one annoyed of the fact that the graphics card is almost always ignored when it comes to exotic cooling.why no phase change cooling option for you graphics card? and not just the gpu i'm talking about the memory aswell. pc ram may not get very hot but gddr does.
Puddleglum - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Check this image: http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/200...">http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tra...ows/2006...Turin39789 - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Now that just needs to drop to $299 and we'll be all setTurin39789 - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
This was the problem I saw with the ocz phase change setup. It seemed very nice for extreme cpu speeds, but it would be nice if they offered an expanded system that had cooling for other system componentsJynx980 - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Can you imagine being the one responsible for getting that $50,000 Brightside TV to the show and then f-cking it up?!"Oooooh, sorry guys, my bad."
JustAnAverageGuy - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
OUCH! That's gotta suck.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Supposedly was the shipping company. That's a hefty insurance bill, I'd wager. It was pretty awesome to see true black from such a crisp LCD, though. They had Doom 3 shots and some other stuff running, and it was all very impressive looking. Hopefully, we can see something get into the market like this in the next year!DigitalDivine - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
i like the tiny dualcor computer. if it has a vga out and usb in, this will be a winner and i would get one as fast as i can.Wesley Fink - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
According to the Specifications, the DualCor has 3 USB 2.0 ports (2 type A and 1 type B), a mini VGA port, and a compact Flash slot. It also has both 1GB of DDR2 Memory and 1GB of Flash Memory. It looks like your wishes are all there.JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
They had it hooked to an LCD, but I don't know if it can run non-native resolutions or not. (Probably a driver update will be required, as at the show it was only outputting 800x480.) It looks like the unit is in early Beta to me, but it's still pretty interesting. Getting 40GB of easily accessible storage for your PDA is nice.