by Anton Shilov
04/08/2003 | 06:33 AM
Legend QDI announced some details about its upcoming Socket A mainboards based on chipsets from VIA Technologies. Both products will be available later this year and today we only publish very preliminary specifications of the boards.
QDI KD7X/400A (-6A, L) will be based on VIA KT400A and VIA VT8235 core-logic set and will support all AMD Athlon XP or Duron processors with 200/266/333MHz FSB. The mainboard will have 3 DDR DIMM slots for up to 3GB of PC2700 or PC3200 memory, an AGP 8x slot, 5 PCI slots and even a CNR slot for future expansions. Unfortunately, QDI does not note Serial ATA-150 support, but expect 2 Parallel ATA-33/66/100/133 ports and 6 USB 2.0 ports. A version with Ethernet support will be also available. Earlier this year I have heard of another mainboard on the same chipset, the K7V400A from QDI, with considerably more advanced specifications, though, its destiny is not known at the moment. The KD7X/400A will be launched in May 2003.
Apparently, it seems that VIA KT600 chipset will be postponed because QDI’s K7V600 mainboard is only scheduled to come in July this year and the manufacturer even does not know when the first samples will be available. On the other hand, there are still no KT400A-based mainboards on the market despite of the fact that the chipset was announced nearly a month ago (see March 10, 2003 news-story), so, maybe VIA Technologies has just decided to postpone all its new chipsets for the Socket A platform for some reason.
QDI K7V600 (-6A, F, L) on VIA KT600 will boast with fairly more attractive peculiarities compared to its predecessor. The product will support all Socket A processors with 200/266/333 and 400MHz FSB, up to 3GB of PC2700 or PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory, an AGP 8x and a CNR slot, 5 PCI slots, 8 USB 2.0 ports and even Serial ATA-150 support thanks to VIA VT8237 I/O controller.
We have not obtained pricing specific information by this moment.