X-bit labs

April 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 04/21/2004 | 09:34 AM ]

Mainboards

Gigabyte is the hero of the last month in this market. First, the company unveiled the Gigabyte RZ product series, the answer to the ASUS X-Series (the companies both use the same approach offering cheaper versions of already produced mainboards), then at the very end of the month they agreed with Foxconn to mass-produce such mainboards. Gigabyte also announced the opening of their new fab in the mainland China. The company has already climbed to the world’s third place in sales volumes and if it keeps on the tempo, it will have a chance to challenge Elitegroup for the second.

Interestingly, Elitegroup made quite an opposite move in March, offering the Extreme mainboard series, positioned as high-end. That’s logical to expand into a non-occupied-yet territory, but on the other hand, Elitegroup will have a hard time trying to overcome its image of a low-end manufacturer. Image is a powerful thing.

CeBIT was a place where one could improve on the image of the company. Models on the i915/i925 chipsets constituted a majority of the presented mainboards and many of them were for the LGA775 socket, including (quite unexpectedly) LGA775 models on the i865PE, which may be the most optimal variant for today. On the other hand, the mixture of the i915 with ordinary DDR SDRAM looks appealing, too.

What’s funny, it transpired after CeBIT that Intel will probably shift the start of shipments of LGA755 processors to June-July, so all the glorious things exposed at CeBIT are likely to remain just showcase samples for the next quarter. So far we can see only E7210-based mainboards appearing in stores (the i875P with a PCI-X-supporting South Bridge), while the prices of the i845GL/GV, 848P and 865G are going down by 1-2 dollars, as usual. A similar price reduction of their family members is expected by the start of the summer, before the launch of the new series.

This pause of course helps VIA and SiS who can now prepare their counterarguments better: PT890 and SiS 656. These two were also present at CeBIT. The SiS 656 was officially announced there, thus becoming formally the first chipset with support of the PCI Express bus. VIA only unveiled two new integrated chipsets before CeBIT, PM800 and PM880, although it’s not quite clear why should they boost the performance of the solution as concerns the system and memory busses, but leave the ancient graphics core that doesn’t need such power!

Mainboards on the PT890 were more adequate offers, as this chipset can support both DDR and DDR2 SDRAM, PCI Express and AGP 8x interfaces. The CN400 chipset for VIA’s own C3 processors was announced where integrated graphics was more to the point than in Pentium 4 systems. Lastly, they also released a new miniature mainboard on this chipset, the Nano-ITX form-factor EPIA-N. On 12x12cm area and with passive cooling, it has everything to build a full-fledged computer. Now VIA seems to have finally found its niche!