Comdex 2002 Motherboard Coverage - Part I

MSI

MSI showed off some very interesting Pentium 4, Athlon XP, and Hammer boards at their booths in the Venetian.

Most motherboard and chipset makers are ready to start producing their Hammer products if they really wanted to. At this point however, motherboard makers have to wait for AMD to get good enough Hammer yields to produce sufficient quantities of them.

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Above we have MSI's SiS 655 motherboard; this board will be named 655 Max or 655 8Xtreme, but won't be available until January 2003 due to low supplies at the moment (more on SiS 655 supplies later).

It's interesting to note that SiS 655 is significantly cheaper than Intel dual DDR E7205 chipset. In fact, we were told that SiS 655 will sell for around $35-37 to certain motherboard makers while Intel is currently selling E7205 chipsets to motherboard makers for around $55. Since we know that fully-loaded E7205 motherboards will retail for between $175 and $190, this gives us a rough indication of how expensive SiS 655 motherboards will be.

Pictured above is MSI's 850E Max2 motherboard. This motherboard supports two RIMMs of RIMM 4200 memory. If you're not already aware, RIMM 4200 is essentially dual channel PC1066 wrapped up into a single module (a 32-bit RIMM). A RIMM 4200 module feeds about 4.2GB/s of bandwidth to the North Bridge, which is equal to the bandwidth provided by the 533MHz FSB. Despite the fact that RIMM 4200 motherboards aren't terribly interesting considering the low availability and high price of RIMM 4200 and 0% performance gain you get versus dual channel PC1066 motherboards, these types of boards are unique nonetheless.

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Finally, we have MSI's nForce2 motherboards. The first pictured nForce2 board (ATX) uses the SPP North Bridge and MCP-T South Bridge. Availability of MSI's nForce2 boards in the U.S. is expected in the first week of December.

Final Words

We shope you enjoyed our coverage of these motherboard manufacturers, we'll be bringing much more over the course of the next few days.