X-bit labs

March 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 03/15/2004 | 02:11 AM ]

Mainboards

As usual, February started with the January reports. Many mainboard makers don’t have much to be proud of, as they lost in shipment quantities compared to December, although not very much, by 4% in total. Again, we should make allowances for the strong growth in the fall, so the situation may be just getting back to the norm. Short-term forecasts are contradictory. While analysts predicted a growth of 3-15% for different companies, the first quarter overall is expected to result in a slump of 10-13%. That’s a strange discrepancy, so let’s wait for the February results at least to make any guesses about the outcome of the situation.

Chipset makers haven’t had much fun lately, too. VIA Technologies reported a February sales reduction of 17.8% compared to January, in money, not quantity. This is also the indication of the too-low price they set for their chipsets. Of course, I mean chipsets for Intel processors – VIA doesn’t have to resort to dumping as far as chipsets for AMD’s CPUs go.

Mainboards for Athlon 64 are becoming cheaper, partially because of cheaper chipsets, too. For example, the not-very-inexpensive Leadtek now offers an nForce3 150-based mainboard for less than $100. The chipset itself is no low-end, as the dual-processor DK8N on the nForce 3 150 from Iwill, to be presented in the second quarter, indicates. Of course, it supports the Socket 940 Opteron.

The just-revealed nForce3 250 has already become nearly obsolete as it belongs to the passing generation of chipsets. The first representative of the new generation – the K8T890 – is already here, for example, in the A8V DX mainboard announced by ASUS: 1GHz HyperTransport, PCI Express 16x in parallel with an AGP port, 7.1 audio. Overall, it is a typical Socket 939 mainboard to support appropriate processors. By the way, the availability of AGP 8x and PCI Express 16x ports on one board creates a curious precedent as far as dual-monitor configurations are concerned, in which every monitor works with its own dedicated and fast 3D accelerator. I’m curious to see if manufacturers and software developers will really use this opportunity.

I should remind you that it’s not only VIA Technologies that produces chipsets for AMD processors. ALi officially announced its M1689 chipset that belongs to the same generation as the K8T800, but includes all functions in one chip. This fact is only of some value for the mainboard makers, rather than end-users, so ALi will have a hard time trying to promote their product in the market. Their only real opportunity is setting an alluring price.

Overall, everything was frozen in the chipset market for Athlon 64/Opteron processors, waiting for the spring. However, Pentium 4 didn’t enjoy much attention in February, either.

Of course, there are super low-cost options here, too. It was hard to imagine just a little while ago that SiS655FX chipset would enrich the category of “everyone-can-afford-it” products. Now we have ASRock P4S55FX+ mainboard: the specification indicates that it is an acceptable option for the Prescott, while the pricing policy of ASRock means you won’t have to pay more than necessary.