Computex 2000 Coverage Day 2: Motherboards

Two days ago we brought you our first day of coverage from Computex 2000 which dealt with the chipsets that dominated the show (Apollo Pro 133A, KT133, i815E) as well as those that were seemingly absent from the floor (820E). Today the topic of discussion is the motherboard manufacturers and the designs they were showcasing at the convention.

Since Computex is much less of an end-user show than Comdex, manufacturers can get away with showing off tons of motherboards that appeal mainly to OEMs and of course the casual AnandTech reader.

As we mentioned in our Day 1 coverage, motherboard manufacturers were primarily displaying their KT133 and i815/815E motherboard designs in addition to the usual array of Apollo Pro 133A boards.

There weren't any DDR Athlon motherboards on display other than the reference board from ALi that wasn't even functional. But DDR motherboards weren't the only thing that wasn't seen on the show floor, motherboards based on Intel's 820 and 820E chipsets could hardly be seen.

Among the more interesting products we saw from the motherboard manufacturers were a handful of Dual Processor boards based on the VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset as well as the ServerWorks ServerSet III LE chipset. For those of you that aren't familiar with the ServerSet III LE chipset it supports the 100/133MHz FSB, PC133 SDRAM, 64-bit PCI (66/33MHz), Ultra ATA 66 and 4 USB ports. As far as performance goes, there haven't been any numbers indicating the expected performance of the ServerSet III LE chipset so we can't really judge the boards until they are finally available. Assuming the performance is up to par with the competition, the ServerSet III LE could be a very interesting solution since it does support dual processors as well as PC133 SDRAM.

Another feature that was pretty big around the show was the simple migration from Slot-1 to Socket-370, while we still saw a number of Slot-1 motherboards at Comdex, they were definitely scarce at Computex. The same can be said about Slot-A versus Socket-A, there is a very noticeable trend towards the socketed CPUs from both their manufacturers and the motherboard makers as well.

Without further ado, let's get to the motherboard manufacturers and what they had to show us at this year's Computex.