Computex 2000 Coverage Day 3: More Motherboards

Gigabyte

While Gigabyte pretty much had the same type of products on display that everyone else we visited had, we ended up taking quite a few pictures at their booth.

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Here we have Gigabyte's i815E boards, the microATX DFP2-F on the left and the ATX DFP2-T on the right.

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Gigabyte's i815E based DFP2-T makes use of an ITE I/O controller, something a fair number of motherboard manufacturers are actually implementing, which provides all of the normal I/O controller functions (FDC, keyboard, etc...) in addition to acting as a controller for a Smart Card reader. While this may not be the most useful feature for a number of AnandTech readers, it was interesting to see nonetheless.

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If you recall, the i810/810E featured an optional integrated display cache which was basically a small set of on-board SDRAM/SGRAM that could be used for your Z-buffer. The i815E no longer has this on-board display cache option, instead, if you plan on using the integrated graphics of the chipset you can simply install a display cache card in the AGP slot as seen above.

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Here we have a CNR card installed on the DFP2-T (the card in the picture is a HomePNA adapter). You can still see the display cache card which is installed in the AGP slot on the very left of the picture. The CNR card would cost an OEM or system integrator much less to include with the motherboard than it would for them to bundle a 10/100 PCI Ethernet card because of the ICH2's integrated LAN controller.

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Above we have a closer look at exactly what a CNR card looks like. Since the LAN controller is integrated into the ICH2 chip, there is very little that must be placed on the CNR card.