Computex 2006: 300W GPUs, Conroe, HDMI Video Cards and Lots of Motherboards

Conroe Motherboards Arrive

Everyone in Taiwan is pretty much excited about the same thing: Conroe. Intel has a major Conroe launch in Taiwan later this week, and all of the motherboard manufacturers are demonstrating their entire line of Conroe ready LGA-775 motherboards. Although Intel's brand new Broadwater chipset (965 series) is being positioned as the platform for Conroe, motherboard manufacturers have been building 975X and 945 based motherboards with Conroe support as well. Unfortunately due to changes in the VRM requirements for Conroe, no current LGA-775 motherboards will work with the new processor.

Motherboard manufacturers are particularly interested in releasing 945 based motherboards with Conroe support simply because the performance is apparently close to 965 platforms, but at a much lower cost.

Much to our surprise, ATI recently informed all of the motherboard manufacturers that CrossFire is currently not supported on 965 (Broadwater) platforms. Apparently the chipset lacks support for peer to peer writes, which are necessary for CrossFire to function. ATI is investigating if a workaround is possible but for now the only option for CrossFire on an Intel chipset with Conroe support is using the 975X platform.

We have also heard rumors of Intel working on a revised version of the 965 chipset with support for two PCI Express x8 slots, instead of the current x16 + x4 configuration. A 965 revision with balanced PCIe slots would make the job of running a multi-GPU configuration much easier, although the imbalance in PCIe lanes is not the reason why CrossFire currently doesn't work on the 965 as mentioned above.

While Conroe is the talk of the town, a few motherboard manufacturers have already received Kentsfield samples from Intel. Kentsfield is a quad-core version of Conroe, still for the desktop market, due out in the first quarter of next year. The motherboard makers that are fortunate enough to have Kentsfield have already confirmed that it is up and running on current P965 and 975X platforms.

The excitement about Conroe is also impacting the forecasts for motherboard shipments later this year. All of the motherboard manufacturers we've spoken to have indicated that they expect to ship even more Intel based motherboards by the end of this year than they currently do. We were also able to get some statistics on the breakdown of shipments according to processor type from a handful of manufacturers:

The majority of manufacturers are shipping more Intel than AMD platforms, and they all expect the split to begin to shift even further in Intel's favor by the end of this year. The two notable exceptions were DFI, whose enthusiast line of motherboards are almost exclusively AMD, and MSI whose shipments were balanced between the two manufacturers.

The other item that's driving Intel motherboard shipments are the July price cuts, which are nothing short of significant. The Pentium D 805 we reviewed not too long ago will drop to an extremely low $93, which is amazing for a dual core processor. The Pentium D 900 series will also see significant price cuts, with the Pentium D 950 falling to $224 and the lower clocked cores all dropping below $200. The price cuts are of course needed in order to help move Pentium D and Pentium 4 processors after Conroe's introduction.

There is a lot of concern about the availability of Conroe, as Intel has only committed to around 25% of its mainstream and high end desktop processor shipments being Conroe by the end of this year. After Dell and HP buy up all the Conroes they will want for their systems, there simply may not be any left for the end user to buy in the channel market. Alternatively, there may end up being some supply in the channel market but at significant markups due to a shortage. It's availability that AMD is counting on to dull the impact of Conroe's launch.

Since AMD moved up its AM2 launch to before Computex, there really wasn't much to talk about with regards to AMD. While most motherboard manufacturers are showing off Socket-AM2 platforms, with no tangible performance improvement over their Socket-939 offerings the interest just isn't there. We've also encountered some frustration from motherboard manufacturers with AMD because they claim that AMD's availability of Socket-AM2 CPUs simply isn't as great as AMD had originally promised.

Interestingly enough, despite AMD's recent announcement of its new 4x4 platform none of the motherboard manufacturers we spoke to had heard of it, much less had a design ready to go. We definitely got the impression that 4x4 was a last minute effort to compete with Conroe on the high end.

The final motherboard-related item we noticed while in Taiwan was that the popularity of passively cooled motherboards has gone up tremendously. Just about every motherboard we were shown either lacked a fan or was about to be redesigned to use passive cooling only. We couldn't be happier.