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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
36 Comments
View All Comments
Powermoloch - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
Very nice guys, great job on the report and such. Especially showing what OCZ is up to with their phase change coolant thing (first time I seen it). Pretty neat to be honest.Son of a N00b - Saturday, January 14, 2006 - link
man that OCZ phase change unit was looking sexy as hell, especially with that oh so tempting price...If only they were able to incorporate northbridge and GPU cooling into it also (even if it was more expensive) to truly earn the name of the revolution...Also it is aimed for the enthusiast market, so space as someone ws complaining about does not matter...
JarredWalton - Saturday, January 14, 2006 - link
They talked about the possibility of a dual GPU cooler block. Part of the problem with that is phase-change requires a lot more complexity than something like water cooling. You're not just cycling liquid through a tube; you have to worry about evaporator/condenser stuff as well. NB and RAM are down on the list in terms of importance, especially with chips like the FX series that have unlocked multipliers.R3MF - Thursday, January 12, 2006 - link
What was the Shuttle s754 'update'?was it a G5 Chassis with a 6100/430 chipset, silent power-brick PSU and support for AMD Turion/A64 processors?
that would be interesting.
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 12, 2006 - link
Actually, I think it was a G2 chassis. I believe http://global.shuttle.com/Product/Barebone/SK21G.a...">this is the unit we saw. K8M800CE chipset doesn't seem like anything really impressive, and there isn't a DVI port. The newer stuff at Shuttle was another Viiv unit, with Core Duo support (as opposed to Pentium D). I don't think I saw anything really new on the AMD side.MrSmurf - Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - link
I was intrigued by the phase change cooling unit as well but it's too big. I like my system to be powerful but tidy and neat at the same time.