Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1168



More than anything else, Computex 2003 has been about fierce competition. The main competitive focuses at this year’s Computex were the launches of high-end desktop processors from AMD and Intel; AMD’s Athlon 64 FX and Intel’s Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. You’ve no doubt seen dozens of CPU reviews across the Internet comparing and contrasting these two high-end microprocessors in an attempt to help readers make informed decisions for their computing needs. Hardware review web sites eat up anything Intel and AMD nowadays, and so this type of wide coverage is not at all uncommon.

A little background on the current CPU wars takes us back to 1999, when AMD launched their K7 (Athlon) architecture that sparked this “arms race” of sorts. Since then, both AMD and Intel have had more or less equal shares of the performance lead, with Intel taking the lead at the high-end the last 10 months or so, and AMD securing the low and middle-end channels during that time. A couple days ago, we saw AMD take back that performance lead from Intel. Now, the only question that remains is whether AMD can supply enough CPUs to channels and OEMs to meet demand. Given the large die size and relatively low yields of current Athlon 64 iterations over at Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany, AMD will no doubt have their hands full. Various manufacturers tell us that AMD is confident that they can produce 400,000 Athlon 64 processors by the end of this year. While certainly a step in the right direction, this quantity is barely enough to feed high-end customers and enthusiasts, and no where near enough to supply the mainstream markets.

The competition in the desktop video card world is equally fierce, as ATI and NVIDIA have been biting and gnawing at each other for years now. This graphics competition really started to brew when ATI introduced the Radeon 8500 in the fall of 2001. After the GeForce4 came along just a few months later, however, NVIDIA pretty much held a dominant lead in every segment of the add-in video card desktop market up until September 2002, when ATI’s Radeon 9700 Pro become readily available. ATI was easily the high-end desktop GPU leader after that, and right up until GeForce FX 5900 Ultras became available in late June of this year. It was a dead heat between NVIDIA and ATI after the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra introduction, but that ended a few weeks ago when the world learned of NVIDIA’s serious DX9 shortcomings in titles such as Half Life 2. This seemed to signal the beginning of the end of NVIDIA’s steady market share lead over the last year. However, just a few days ago it was announced by Valve that Half Life 2 was going to miss the September 30th target. In a way, ATI faces the exact opposite scenario that AMD is in; ATI can supply enough DX9 (9600 and 9800) video cards to market, but may not see an upsurge in those sales (mostly in the retail channel) in the near future because of Half Life 2’s delayed introduction. Of course, there are other legitimate DX9 titles coming soon that will spurn sales of ATI’s DX9 cards, and there even may be a great deal of users that figure they can simply buy ATI cards now and wait for Half Life 2 (which we suggest you do if you’re buying now). Either way, competition is a great boon for any industry, and we certainly hope it never stops.

Anyway, read on as we discuss the latest happenings in our Day 4 coverage of Computex….



Albatron

Albatron didn’t have a lot to show off at Computex this year. They are doing very well with their current line of 865PE and nForce2 motherboards.

Pictured above is Albatron’s nForce3 motherboard. Right now, Albatron isn’t too enthusiastic about Athlon 64, which is quite a change of tone from other motherboard makers who believe Athlon 64 can do quite well with more quantity. Albatron cited memory issues and compatibility as problems for Athlon 64. However, we haven’t run into any real issues with Athlon 64 motherboards at this point in time; so far Athlon 64 motherboards have proven to be extremely mature. Anyway, Albatron believes that nForce3 is the way to go for Athlon 64 if it does take off soon.

One other interesting tidbit of information we learned from Albatron is that they are skipping VIA’s PT880 dual channel DDR400 Pentium 4 chipset in favor of VIA’s PT890, which is slated for November. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with PT880 though, Albatron just doesn’t need to interrupt their current product cycle with a PT880, especially since they’re going to introduce an 875P motherboard to displace their 865PE-based PX865PE Pro II next month.



Biostar

Biostar is still primarily a motherboard company, as was made quite apparent at their booth this year. However, like almost every other manufacturer that attended Computex, Biostar is expanding their market reach into SFFs (Small Form Factors), laptops, and full desktop systems. Lets first talk about Biostar’s upcoming motherboards.

Pictured above is a Biostar motherboard based on the ATI IGP 9000 chipset, comprised of the IGP 9000 North Bridge and IXP 150 South Bridge. Interestingly enough, it seems as if motherboard makers are finally starting to see some value in ATI’s chipsets. While not a discrete chipset (i.e. no graphics), Biostar believes that this particular chipset will do OK due to its good stock performance and excellent onboard graphics (easily besting nForce2’s IGP in DX8 gaming and most DX7 games). We’ll be examining this motherboard or a motherboard like it in about 3-4 weeks.

The above motherboard is Biostar’s PT800 board, based on VIA’s PT800 chipset. This single channel DDR400 is slated as a low cost solution for Pentium 4 users. However, we’ve heard from multiple manufacturers that PT800 has been quite troublesome, especially with various types of memory. Apparently this is being fixed in a revision sometime down the road, but exactly when is unknown.

The two motherboards shown above are Biostar’s Athlon 64 motherboard solutions. The motherboard on the top is Biostar’s VIA K8T800-based motherboard, and the motherboard on the bottom is Biostar’s NVIDIA nForce3 150-based motherboard. Right now, if you’re an overclocker, we suggest a motherboard based on nForce3 150 or 250. If you’re not much of an overclocker and simply desire a cheap, stable and fast Athlon 64 motherboard, either nForce3 150/250 or K8T800 will do just fine.

The SFFs you see listed above are all Biostar creations. They’re all ODM (Original Design Manufacturers) designs, but Biostar claims that they offer additional performance and price advantages with their choice of parts. Some of these SFFs are based on the yesterday’s newly announced single channel DDR Athlon 64 3200+ processor, and some are Biostar’s somewhat “old” 845PE and nForce2 creations.



DFI

This year, DFI was all about their patented “CMOS Reloaded” BIOS options. CMOS Reloaded was created by the lead engineer who designed ABIT’s famous BH6 motherboard from the old PIII Celeron days of yore.

As you can see above, CMOS Reloaded allows users to save BIOS settings of their choosing using the Backup command. High-end DFI motherboards will have the ability to save a total of four different sets of BIOS settings depending on what the user would like to do with their machine. For example, if someone wants to have aggressive BIOS settings for gaming, all they have to do is create that configuration and save it to CMOS and they’ll be able to use that setting every time instead of having to change their settings each time they enter the BIOS. All in all, CMOS Reloaded is an interesting idea and a very useful BIOS feature.

Some other motherboards DFI had displayed at Computex included an Athlon 64 motherboard based on ALi’s Hammer chipset. This is the first motherboard we’ve seen based on ALi’s Hammer chipset at Computex. However, DFI says that it performs well and they even believe they can make it their flagship Athlon 64 motherboard. We’ll have to wait and see how this chipset develops.

DFI’s VIA K8T800-based motherboard, pictured above, is ready for prime time and should ship in quantity in about two weeks. So far, DFI says that they have been able to get K8T800 to work better than nForce3, which they are delaying due to driver issues. It’s really quite odd that there all motherboard makers seem to be split right down the middle on nForce3 and K8T800 performance numbers and stability issues.



Jetway

Jetway had quite a bit to show off at Computex this year, including their own line of NVIDIA video cards, desktop motherboards, SFFs, and LCDs.

The box pictured above is Jetway’s Pentium 4-based SFF. We absolutely love the front panel design; a sleek LCD panel displays AM/FM radio stations, and anything else loaded in either of the optical drives. Then there’s the cool silver color lining that makes this SFF stand out more than any other we saw at Computex this year. The nicest addition is front panel serial ports such as USB 2.0, IEEE 1394 FireWire, and SPDIF. This is quite an SFF we look forward to reviewing in the near future.

The picture listed just above us is yet another Jetway SFF, this time based on the Athlon 64 3200+ processor. The USB/FireWire front panel serial ports and choice of CPU make this a very powerful SFF.

Jetway’s SFFs are definitely much more attractive than most we’ve seen at Computex this year, save for Shuttle. We commend them on a job well done.

The motherboard above is Jetway’s SiS 755 Athlon 64 motherboard. This Hammer board is based on the single channel DDR 754-pin Athlon 64 processor and will include SiS’ 964 with native Serial ATA when it ramps up production next month.

Jetway also had their nForce3 motherboard on display, the N3KA. This board is based on the nForce3 150 chipset and is of the Socket 754 variety. Around this time, we learned from a manufacturer close to NVIDIA that the graphics firm was attempting to ship their new South Bridge, MCP-S1000, next month. The “S” in MCP-S1000 stands for native Serial ATA support, and the “1000” stands for 10/100/1000 GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) support. nForce3 chips with these two new technologies are expected to hit the market in November.



Shuttle

Not surprisingly, Shuttle had some Hammer motherboards to show off at Computex this year.

The motherboard pictured above is Shuttle’s nForce3 150 motherboard. Shuttle is very concentrated on SFF sales, so this will be Shuttle’s primary R&D focus on the AMD side of things versus continuing to support and develop nForce2 motherboards. Shuttle decided to not go with VIA simply because their relationship with NVIDIA is strong, and they see no need to engineer a VIA K8T800 motherboard when nForce3 performed as expected.

Shuttle is also one of several motherboard makers intrigued by ATI’s IGP9000 chipset. Shuttle’s nForce2 IGP motherboard was a big seller, but they like their Radeon IGP9000 chances even better. It’ll be interesting to see if the IGP9000 can drive some sales based on it’s excellent DX8 compatibility.

The most interesting news from Shuttle at this event was their announcement that they would be bundling Linux (Mandrake 9) with all their upcoming SFFs for the foreseeable future. This is certainly an interesting turn of events, and will hopefully further drive Linux to the mainstream as others (like Walmart) have done with the power they have.



Cheap Itanium 2's?

As you may or may not have heard, Intel recently released two low-priced Itanium 2 processors on Monday. The first of these two I2 processors runs at 1.0GHz and comes with 1.5MB of L3 cache, at the very attractive price of $744. This is the low voltage version of I2, previously codenamed Deerfield, and the one and only one Intel plans on releasing for a few months. The other low-priced I2 runs at 1.4GHz and also comes with 1.5MB of L3 cache. This is not a low voltage processor, but it is low-priced at just $1,172. All prices are in lots of 1000.

By the way, we’re not being sarcastic when we call these processors “low-priced”; the cost of entry for 64-bit processing has really never been this low for such a legitimate 64-bit architecture. Of course, Opteron prices are very competitive with these prices, and on the average noticeably cheaper actually. I2’s 32-bit performance is no where near as fast as Opteron series processors, but depending on the 64-bit application, I2 is much faster, and could be much faster in the future when more applications are developed specifically for IA-64.

After considerable searching, we were finally able to track down some of these low-priced, low-voltage I2 processors at Computex. The one and only manufacturer that had these I2 processors was Supermicro, who displayed two I2 processors in a 1U rackmount. This dual CPU setup can be ordered with I2 processors of up to 6MB, and of course can be ordered with the 1GHz low voltage I2 and 1.4GHz I2 with 1.5MB L3 cache each.



XGI Technology

We happened to stop by XGI, which is a new graphics part company that has recently created a stir with their Volari graphic processors. The company is actually comprised of about 300 some workers and of that number about 250 is research and development. The research and development is split into two groups: hardware and software, with software making up 150 and hardware 100. The particular interest that they have managed to generate comes from their claim that their dual graphic cards are competitive with ATI and NVIDIA, both from a cost and a performance standpoint. Right now it is hard to say.

Volari Product Line

Click to enlarge.

We saw a demo of a Volari V8 Ultra in a mix mode benchmark of DX8 and DX9 pixel shaders, and it seems to not quite be up to par with some other stuff we have seen. However, this was a demo, and it could be the performance we saw was limited to this particular software title. The bidirectional link between the two graphic processors is certainly of interest, but the cost is issue is an obvious one that will determine a lot. Even if XGI can produce a graphic processor (two of them technically) that can beat out ATI and NVIDIA in performance, they need to be able to offer it a low [or no] premium over their competitors. The pricing range for them to adjust will depend on how much more they can deliver.

Final Words

Well, that about wraps up our motherboard and video Computex coverage for this year. Don't forget about our additional Computex coverage of optical storage, displays and enclosure analysis coming your way. And stay tuned as we will take an exclusive first look at yet another next generation processor during the next few days...

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now