X-bit labs

X-bit Labs CeBIT Hannover 2004 Coverage: Part 1 (page 4)

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/21/2004 | 01:50 PM ]

XGI Volari from ABIT, Chaintech

Right opposite to Club 3D booth there is XGI’s booth. While my meeting with XGI is scheduled for Friday, I could not miss the opportunity to picture XGI’s products. What I was certainly very impressed about are XGI-based graphics cards from ABIT and Chaintech. A man near the booth said that products from both are in volume production today.

Pay attention to pretty simplistic design of the dual-chip Volari Duo V8 Ultra graphics card from ABIT compared to the reference. There are no plethora of capacitors and resistors and in general PCB is probably a not very tough one. We definitely should expect some more than competitive pricing from ABIT here.

ASUS’ Socket T and Socket 939 Mainboards

Booth of ASUSTeK Computer is as usually filled with loads of people and contains dozens of hardware. The company does not expose really a lot of graphics cards, but showcases nearly the whole range of its up-to-date and new mainboards, including those for LGA775 and PGA939 microprocessors from Intel and AMD.

Be it Grantsdale-P (i915-P), Alderwood (i925X), PT890 (pay attention on availability of both PCI Express x16 and AGP 8x slots on this mainboard!) or nForce3 250Gb – ASUS seems to have a mainboard based on it.

In fact, ASUS did not restrict itself with just showing the mainboards, but put up a system based on i925X, LGA775 chip, DDR2 memory from Corsair and a PCI Express graphics cards from ATI Technologies. Unfortunately, no benchmarks were presented at this time.

One more funky thing showcased by ABIT was a system running a processor at 5GHz. The chip is 3.20GHz PGA478, but ASUS did not elaborate whether it is Northwood or Prescott. The computer features a P4C800 mainboard (probably a modded one) and a special cooling solution from nVENTIV.