Leading mainboard maker Microstar International said Wednesday it commenced significant shipments of its mainboards based on ATI RADEON XPRESS 200-series chipsets two weeks back, a bit later than expected, and denied rumours about product recall. Sources close to the company added that they suspected rivals to be behind the buzz.

MSI Denies Product Recall

Early on Wednesday a number of sources said MSI began to recall its mainboards powered by ATI’s latest chipsets for AMD64 processors with PCI Express bus. However, it was unclear what exactly MSI was recalling, as availability of such products on the market is currently very low.

“We did receive many phone calls and emails this morning regarding this rumour. We did not recall any products and we really don’t know where and how the rumour started. As for this item selling status, we have started to sell this item about 2 weeks ago,” a spokesperson for MSI told X-bit labs.

Some other people familiar with the matter assumed the rumour was spread by some of the company’s rivals. Another named a number of US-based system and chip companies being among the first to start talking about the recall.

The Only ATI RADEON XPRESS 200 Product is in Low Availability

MSI’s RS480 mainboard was projected to show up in mid-December, 2004, but due to various reasons it begins to emerge on the market only very recently, a month later than expected. But even now availability of such product deserves better, some say.

“MSI is not shipping mainboards in high volume into the channel at this time. As a result any story about a massive recall would be grossly inaccurate. Current MSI RS480 products are largely targeted towards forthcoming OEM projects and they remain on track,” a source with knowledge of the matter told X-bit labs.

MSI’s RS480 product is based on the RADEON XPRESS 200 chipset earlier code-named RX480, an incarnation among XPRESS 200-series products without integrated DirectX 9.0 graphics core. The mainboard can sport virtually all processors for Socket 939 infrastructure with 1000MHz HyperTransport bus, including AMD Athlon 64 FX, AMD Athlon 64 and AMD Sempron. Besides, the MS-7093 is among the first PCI Express platforms for microprocessors from Advanced Micro Devices.

The micro-ATX RS480 mainboards are equipped with 4 slots for PC3200, PCI Express x16 slot, 3 PCI slots, 4 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID capabilities, 2 Parallel ATA-133 connectors, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, FireWire, USB 2.0, built-in 6-channel AC’97 audio and so on.

Other mainboard makers have not started to ship their ATI RADEON XPRESS 200-series mainboards yet.

Anna Filatova, Editor in Chief for X-bit labs, contributed to the news-story.