by Anna Filatova
06/22/2002 | 10:32 PM
The Japanese stores, which are known for being the first ones in the world to start selling early products, were noticed showing two new MSI mainboards for the not yet announced ClawHammer processor from AMD. These mainboards are working samples and will not be sold. They are simply demonstrated as some kind of fetishes in the so called “future technology museum”.
The mainboards are called K8A Gem (MS-6589) and K8H Gem (MS-6702). The first one uses a chipset developed by AMD, AMD-8000, and the second one is based on VIA Technologies K8HTA core logic.<%BANNER[article]%>
These MSI products boast a few very interesting peculiarities, which we are going to discuss now. Both mainboards are equipped with a socket marked as Socket754. supposedly, the marking will remain valid for the future products as well.
We have to point out slightly unusual PCB design of the K8A Gem mainboard based on AMD chipset (you can see the pictures here). The two DIMM slots available on the board are located not on the right of the processor socket, as they actually should but above. As for the expansion slots location it appeared completely outstanding and we have never come across anything like that until today.
Usually the AGP slot is located at the top of the PCB and then come PCI/ISA/AMR/ACR/CNR slots. However, this mainboard seems to be breaking all laws of mainboard building: the AGP slot is proudly standing between the PCI slots (there are 5 of them). This unusual location of the slots is most likely to be caused by the chipset components location, which you can see on the pictures here. Maybe this is one of the resons for this weird layout.
Among the other interesting features that might be worth mentioning, we should point out the North Bridge packaging, which reminds us nostalgically of the AMD K6-2, and a network controller from Realtek.
K8H Gem (MS-6702) mainboard based on VIA K8HTA chipset is vividly red. The board is of more standard design with the common location of the processor socket, 5 PCI, 1 CNR and 3 DIMM slots. Massive heatsinks on the CPU voltage regulators catch your eye right away. The previous mainboard mentioned didn’t have anything of the kind onboard.
The North Bridge without any cooling on it also indicates that this mainboard is not going to sell.
And now a few words about a bunch of tidbits onboard. The first thing to be mentioned is the new RAID controller from Promise marked as PDC20376. Its major peculiarity is the support of the new SerialATA protocol. It works with 1 regular ATA/133 80-pin connector and two SerialATA-150 connectors. We should also say that K8H Gem boasts USB 2.0 and FireWire (IEEE1394) ports too. The latter is implemented via VIA VT6306 chip.
MS6702 mainboard features an integrated sound solution (C-media chip), which has already become common for contemporary mainboards and provides pretty nice sounding quality.
So, MSI seems to be ready for the coming of His Majesty ClawHammer. I wonder how soon the other mainboard makers will be ready for that, especially bearing in mind that there is still a lot of time left before the official launch. However, this quickness of MSI’s is very pleasing and indicates how seriously MSI takes ClawHammer. As soon as AMD launches the CPU, there will be a place to install it already :)