by Anton Shilov
06/15/2003 | 08:24 AM
In addition to our Friday’s news-story about VIA PT800-based mainboard from ABIT, we can now share some more information about ABIT’s mainboard plans with you. With the success of ABIT’s IC7 and IS7 series, roadmap of this company should be interesting to a lot of you.
<%BANNER[article]%>Besides the VI7 powered by the PT800 core-logic from VIA (see this news-story for more information about the part), ABIT will also release yet another i875P-based mainboard in the third quarter this year. This will be the IC7-MAX3 supporting the latest Intel Socket 478 processors with 533 and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, dual-channel PC3200 memory, AGP 8x, 6 Serial ATA-150 ports, FireWire, USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet and so on. I am not sure, what will actually be different between the original IC7-G and IC7-MAX3 mainboard. Maybe the lack of legacy ports on the latter? That is hardly a big advantage, so, if you are planning to get the IC7-G now, I do not think you really should wait for the new IC7-MAX3 mainboard.
Later this month or early next-month the company will also release its VIA KT600-based mainboard brand-named as KV7. It will provide the support of the latest AMD Athlon “Thoroughbred” and “Barton” processors with up to 400MHz FSB in addition to PC3200 and AGP8x support. Given that the mainboard will be equipped with VIA VT8237 I/O controller, expect the KV7 to support 2 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID Stripe for better performance. Hopefully, the mainboard will boast other necessary features as well, including 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, USB 2.0, maybe even FireWire and so on.
All the products mentioned above will be available in the third quarter this year. Mainboards described below will come in the fourth quarter of the year.
Sometimes in mid-September, presumably at Computex Taipei 2003, ABIT will announce its mainboard based on VIA PT880 core-logic. Basically speaking, the device will have a lot in common with the VI7, but will also feature dual-channel PC3200 DDR SDRAM support.
ABIT will not forget about Socket 754 CPUs and will release its mainboards based on chipsets from NVIDIA and VIA Technologies in October this year.
ABIT KN8-G will be based on NVIDIA Crush K8 chipset. It will provide HyperTransport link, AGP 8x, 6 Serial ATA-150 ports, USB 2.0, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet, SoundStorm, 6-channel audio and so on. VIA K8T800-powered KV8-G will offer the same features and capabilities, but no proprietary technologies from NVIDIA, such as SoundStorm, of course.
The original news-story was published by The Register. Bear in mind that the information is not really official and ABIT may change its plans sometime in future.