The Leading Mainboard Manufacturers Show Their Hammer Solutions

by Ilya Gavrichenkov
06/05/2002 | 06:47 PM

It seems that AMD has managed to succeed as a processor manufacturer. We’d like to recall a 3 years old story, when K7 appeared – chipset manufacturers didn’t want to develop anything for the new processor, and mainboard manufacturers didn’t want to produce anything for it. As a result, AMD had to develop its own chipset, promote it on the market, reduce the price of PCB design, etc. Only some months later VIA has announced the KX133 chipset; and mainboards based on it, had the cost of $300 and more at the beginning. It didn’t increase AMD’s popularity though, because this could hardly be called a good chipset. It wasn’t easy to promote Athlon.

Now there is a feeling that Hammer is needed more than air to manufacturers – practically all the leading chipset and mainboard manufacturers are presenting their solutions at Computex (see this news). They all must have finally realized that AMD is able to develop remarkable products. <%BANNER[article]%>

So, the following mainboards for ClawHammer were presented at Computex.

Mainboards on AMD-8000:

• MSI K8A Gem (photo). We’d like to draw special attention to an unusual AGP-port location: it’s between PCI. It was probably made to reduce the trace length. AGP North Bridge.
• ASUS K8M (photo). In case of ASUS we should note the simplicity of the design (All genius is simple) and an AGP Pro port.
• GIGABYTE GA-K8A (photo).
• FIC HB11 (photo).

Mainboards on VIA K8HTA:

• BIOSTAR K8VHA (photo).
• MSI K8H Gem-ABIL (photo). This mainboard is the only one among all the presented mainboards with 3 DIMM slots.
• CHAINTECH 8VJA (photo).
• LUCKYSTAR K8HTA (photo).
• SOYO VIA K8HTA (photo). The crimson color of the PCI-slots and red socket for the processor together with the black PCB make this mainboard look stylish.

So, the industry has approved of Hammer and is happy to support it.