X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

These are all plans and perspectives, though. As for real products for AMD processors, there’s only the nForce3 250Gb – MSI, EPoX, Chaintech and ASUS all announced mainboards on this chipset in April.

There was scanty info about other chipsets. Well, it’s hard to regard seriously integrated solutions for the Athlon 64 like the Gigabyte GA-K8S760M mainboard on the SiS760 chipset, selling for $120-130 in Japan or the K8M800-based DFI K8M800-MLV mainboard, announced in late April.

DFI behaved overall weirdly in April, introducing such “novelties” as PT800-AL, P4X533-ALE and 661FX-MLV on chipsets that you know of. Well, Acorp was no better than that with its 4PMMN (P4M266A) and 4848P (i848P). Soltek and MSI also took part in this retro-show, being the first to offer mainboards on the dual-channel, but not very necessary nowadays KT880 chipset.

That’s not all as we have a whole weird platform, VIA’s EPIA. With all its ambiguity, it is developing, although not through its chipsets. In April, the speed of the C3 processor grew by 200MHz to 1.2GHz and there appeared a version of the mainboard without any lead. How do you treat this against the background of “serious” mainboards on any of the above-mentioned chipsets?

Of course, this is a purely niche solution, but anyway niche solutions differ. There’s absolute exotics like Transmeta’s Crusoe and there are quite operational workhorses like the server Canterwood-ES (E7210) and Lindenhurst (E7520), coming to the market on MSI’s MasterX-FS and MasterX-FA6R, and Supermicro X6DH8-G2 mainboards that MSI showcased in April in Japan.

Well, it’s time to wind up this section now that we’ve got to niche solutions. A bit of statistics for March: ASUS (with ASRock) with 3.6 million shipped boards is on top, followed by ECS (1.41 million) and Gigabyte (1.40 million). MSI comes next with 1.25 products shipped. It will be interesting to watch the fate of the second place in the next months – will Gigabyte, which has been dwelling on the fourth position, get entrenched there?