X-bit labs

ASUS Promotes AGP 8x.

Category: Other

by Anna Filatova

[ 07/31/2002 | 05:18 AM ]

ASUS started a promotion campaign moving forward its own products with AGP 8x bus support. The page below is a good example of the printed promotion material of the kind:

As you can easily notice, the major characters of this leaflet are ASUS A7V8X mainboard based on VIA KT400 and ASUS P4S8X mainboard on SiS648. This way, the mentioned mainboards are expected to start selling pretty soon. At the same time, the fact that there is no mention of A7N8X mainboard on NVIDIA nForce2 in this leaflet, makes us suppose that ASUS has some problems launching this solution into mass market, and we will hardly be able to see it in retail at least until the end of summer.

As for A7V8X and P4S8X, the promotion materials allow us to figure out the major technical specs of these mainboards. This way, A7V8X for Socket A systems will support AGP 8x, DDR400, SerialATA (via an integrated controller, I suppose), ATA/133, USB 2.0, IEEE1394 (also integrated onboard) and 6-channel sound. P4S8X for Pentium 4 CPUs will also support AGP 8x, DDR333 (and unofficially DDR400), SerialATA (via an onboard controller), ATA/133, IDE RAID, USB 2.0, IEEE1394 (also via an integrated controller) and 6-channel audio.

In conclusion I would like to point out that such a well-known manufacturer as ASUS started viewing SiS chipsets not only as a low-cost solution for Value systems. This indicates the fact that P4S8X mainboard is not that low-cost at all, because it has a lot of onboard chips. So, we have every right to congratulate SiS with a great success: their chipsets managed to win really great reputation within a very short period of time.