Introduction
The second part of my look back at Computex 99 will summarize all the other interesting new products and developments I came across. As you could see in part one already, Computex seems to become a lot more meaningful. Many new developments in the computer industry are either coming from Taiwan, or they depend on the support from Taiwanese businesses. K7, PC133 and Whitney (Intel 810) are only a few of those.
Intel’s 810 chipset is finally starting to ship
Visiting motherboard makers at Computex included one thing in any case, the introduction of a new motherboard line based on the Intel 810 chipset. You certainly remember it, it’s Intel’s new low cost platform chipset with included 3D-graphics. Listing all the motherboard makers that supply 810-boards would definitely go to far here, but there will be a 810-motherboard review published at Tom’s Hardware Guide very soon. I know that the power users amongst you couldn’t care less about these platforms, but some of you may start realizing that integration is the actual future of computers. Soon we’ll be happy to say goodbye to the good old desktop PC, when it starts to get replaced by smaller, more practical and much more user-friendly products. 810 , SiS620, SiS630, VIA MVP4, …. are not yet advanced enough to replace a PC, but they are marking the first step away from the loud, hot and clumsy machines we use to sit in front of today.
As soon as the new Pentium III with 133 MHz front side bus, also known as ‘Coppermine’, will be released in September, Intel will introduce the ‘810e’ chipset, which has two major differences to 810. The supported FSB will be 133 MHz and the display cache will be clocked at 133 MHz as well. For some crazy reason the RAM is still supposed to run at 100 MHz, probably just to show how much Intel disapproves PC133.
SiS introduces new graphics chip SiS300 – Part 1
In the first part of my Computex Summary I already mentioned the SiS630 super-integrated chipset. Now the 3D-graphics part inside 630 will be based on the SiS300 3D-accelerator, which has also just been introduced. The predecessor of SiS300 is SiS6326 and this chip couldn’t really amaze us too much at all. 6326 was a low cost/low performance solution for the Asian mass market and hardly successful in the US or Europe at all, it combined an average 2D-core and a pretty low-quality RAMDAC with a below-par 3D-engine plus a video-render engine with included motion-compensation, which was its only real highlight. Still SiS was obviously able to sell as many 3D-chips as Nvidia and Matrox last year, so that SiS is ranking the number three graphics chip provider world wide, together with the above mentioned 3D-chip makers and behind the leader ATI and the second S3. Again, this ranking is based on unit sales only, not on revenues or anything. We all know that a Nvidia chip costs a lot more than an ATi, S3 or SiS graphics chip.
Now SiS300 is still not supposed to compete with the latest chips from Nvidia, 3Dfx or Matrox, but it looks as it could become a pretty decent performer, competing with Nvidia’s Vanta, 3Dfx’s Voodoo3 2000, S3’s Savage4 and ATI’s Rage 128. The architecture as well as the features provided look pretty interesting. First of all, SiS300 will not come really dual-pipelined, but it has indeed got two parallel texture mapping units, so that it can render one dual textured pixel in one pass, just as all the other really dual-pipelined 3D-chips like Voodoo3, TNT2, Rage128, …
SiS introduces new graphics chip SiS300 – Part 2
The chip is clocked at 125 MHz, which will provide a fill rate of only 125 Mpixels/s for single-textured pixels, but the fill rate is supposed to stay the same for dual-textured pixels, which compares to a dual-pipelined chip with a fill rate of 250 Mpixels/s. From that point of view, the 3D-performance should be in the range of a TNT2 at 125 MHz and better than S3’s Savage4 as well as Rage 128 in all applications that use multi-texturing. SiS expects triangle rate of 4 Mpolys/s. Please don’t forget that those are only theoretical numbers though, the final product will have to show if it can live up to those expectations.
The next interesting feature of SiS300 is its support of up to 64 MB of graphics memory. The memory interface is 128-bit wide, identical to most other current 3D-chips on the market. The memory clock is supposedly 143 MHz, so that SiS300 will have a similar memory bandwidth as Voodoo3 2000, Savage4 or the basic TNT2. It will seemingly come with AGP 2x-support and later add AGP 4x-support, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The integrated MPEG2-decoder will include motion compensation as well, so that SiS300 will be well capable to display DVD-movies just fine and if you combine SiS300 with an additional little SiS301-chip, you can do pretty much the same as with G400’s ‘dual-head’.
SiS300 plus SiS301 will provide either two VGA outputs or one VGA plus one digital flat panel output or one VGA plus one video output. SiS301 also adds a video encoder for video input. Let me quickly list the other numbers. SiS300 will come with a 350 MHz RAMDAC, it will include a 32-bit Z-buffer and a built-in TMDS-LCD transmitter. SiS301 will add a second 135 MHz RAMDAC.
ALi is also offering integrated solution
Even before Intel launched the 810-chipset there was a big interest of Taiwanese chipset makers into chipsets with integrated graphics. Of course ALi has also got their 810-competitor ready to go, going by the name of ‘Aladdin Pro III. This chipset with the code number ‘M1631’ will support PC133-memory, the Intel P6-interface and it includes the graphics engine of a well known and well respected 3D-chip maker, whose name I’m not allowed to tell you yet though. You are still allowed to guess, when I tell you that it might prove to be a pretty powerful integrated 3D-engine. All ALi-chipsets will be aided by a new south bridge (code number ‘M1535’), that will add ATA-66, integrated hardware audio with wave table, ready for AC97 and 2 USB hubs offering 4 USB-ports.
Asus is fighting fake graphics cards and fake motherboards
Currently Asus worst enemy comes in form of products that look like Asus-products, but they are fake stuff instead. Thus please make sure that your V3400 or V3800 card as well as your P2B-motherboards are real Asus products. If you experience strange problems with your Asus graphics card or motherboard you may want to consider checking with Asus if this product isn’t a fake one. Another annoying thing happened at the Asus V3400 message board and news group, a hacker claimed to be an official Asus spokesman and announced that Asus had stopped supporting V3400. This announcement is FALSE!
H.C. Hung, the father of Asus’ graphics division
H.C. Hung, the father of the Asus graphics products is under a lot of stress right now. Not only that somebody made the above-mentioned false announcement, he also has a huge amount of work to do finishing everything up for the final launch of V3800, the Asus TNT2 3D-card. The V3800 comes with more features than any other graphics vendor is offering with his TNT2-card, but this means that the software support for the V3800 costs a lot more time and effort than its competitors. You certainly remember that V3800 comes with stereo-glasses, TV-out, TV-in and a video-capturing option that offers the recording of videos at TV-resolution without frame drops. Those videos can be stored in motion-JPEG as well as MPEG2-format, depending on if you want to edit the videos after capturing or not. There will be an off-line MPEG2 software-encoder included as well. This all is supposed to work with a PII 400 or above already. You can see that H.C.’s goals are high and I am sure that he will achieve them, but this may mean that you’ll have to wait for the V3800 a bit longer than for the majority of its competitors.
Summarized Motherboard News
I decided that it’s getting too far if I add a special chapter for each motherboard manufacturer, thus I’ll just list all the news that I consider as important:
Abit
Additionally to the already mentioned BP6 dual Celeron board, there are two other new boards avaialble now. The BE6 is a Slot1-BX motherboard that comes with two additional ATA-66 sockets, supporting the new EIDE hard drives for the DMA66 bus mastering. The BE6 seems similar to BX6 Rev.2, but it has one DIMM slot less. The BY6 is the same as BE6, only that it’s for Socket370.
One thing about Abit and Computex I may not forget, the ‘Happy Hour Party’ on Wednesday! There wasn’t only loads of food and drinks, we also could enjoy a ‘fashion show’, where eight Taiwanese models where ‘wearing’ motherboards (and some clothes too actually). This really cool show was presented by beauty queen Iris (Abit’s PR manager for Asia/Pacific), who was the most adored woman of the evening, no doubt about it.
The eight models ‘wearing motherboards’ and almost invisible on the very left Iris, who left a deep impression on each male visitor I talked to that evening.
AOpen
AOpen is very proud to have won ‘Best of Computex99’ with its AX6BC Pro Slot1-motherboard.
The AX6BC Pro is probably already known to many overclockers, since it comes with a jumperless design that also offers the adjustment of the CPU core-voltage. The other interesting product from AOpen is certainly the AX63 Pro, using VIA’s Apollo Pro 133 chipset and thus PC133-support. You are probably already aware of the TNT2-board from AOpen, called PA3010.
Asus
Asus will very soon release its P3B-line of motherboards. Those boards will include a jumperless design that Asus patented specially and which is called ‘jumper-free’. Supposedly it offers even more adjustments than any other jumperless design and once the system doesn’t boot because of too high overclocking, it will definitely reboot at a safe setting the next time, without the user needing to do anything special. At the same time those boards will offer the alternative of adjusting the CPU-settings mechanically with dip switches. Asus is also offering a range of PC133 motherboards and Jerry Chen, the R&D chief of Asus’s motherboard design team, is very pleased with his special version of a K7-motherboard also.
A-Trend
Besides an impressive bunch of graphics and sound cards, as an Intel i752, S3 Savage4 Pro, S3 Trio3D 2x and SiS300 3D-card and Fortemedia801, Y724 sound card, A-Trend is also offering a pretty wide selection of motherboards. The most interesting motherboard products are the ATC6253M, a Slot1-BX-board with integrated 3Dfx Voodoo3 2000 onboard and the ATC6258, a Slot1-U2W-SCSI-motherboard with included Yamaha 740 surround-sound chip.
Azza
This smaller motherboard vendor tries to catch the eye with some special features. Similar to Elitegroup it offers several motherboards with a Slot1 as well as a Socket370 onboard. All motherboards are shipped with ‘Free500X’, a CD-ROM emulation software that lets you e.g. play games without the CD-ROM in the drive. It obviously makes a copy of the CD and saves it on your hard drive, then it uses this copy as virtual CD. Let’s see what the software industry thinks about this practical idea. The other interesting feature is called ‘AirBus’. This may prove very helpful for resellers who get a lot of RMAs due to unsuccessful flash procedures of motherboard users.
The ‘AirBus’ is a little module that you plug into the motherboard after you killed your flash BIOS (why would anyone do that, hehe?). It automatically flashes the old BIOS back into the board EEPROM at the next boot. This could indeed save a huge amount of RMAs.
Biostar
Unfortunately I can’t find my product brochure anymore, but what I can remember is that Biostar is also one of the few that designed a K7-motherboard. Biostar will also supply PC133-motherboards based on the VIA 693(A).
Chaintech
There’s not too many amazing products available from Chaintech right now, but we all know that the normal motherboards have a high reputation when it comes to quality. Chaintech offers two PC-133 motherboards with VIA’s 693(A) chipset, one for Slot1 and one for S370, but both boards are in micro-ATX form factor, which shows that Chaintech considers the PC133-solution only for low cost. There’s also two TNT2-cards out, the ‘Desperado AGP-R130’ and ‘Desperado AGP R140/4’ according to the normal and ‘ultra’ version of TNT2. ‘Desperado’ could possibly mean that Chaintech is quite desperate to sell them.
DFI
DFI’s product range is quite huge and impressive indeed, but besides a very wide range of 810, BX and ZX-products there was only the PA63 really interesting to me. It’s an ATX Slot1-PC133-motherboard with VIA’s 693(A) chipset and integrated AC97 audio/modem support.
FIC
Due to FIC’s close relationship to VIA, there were 3 PC133 motherboards announced. One of them, the KA31, comes with VIA’s Apollo Pro Plus, including integrated 3D-graphics, the other two KA11 and KA-6110 are using the VIA Apollo Pro 133 chipset. I’ve chosen the picture of KA11, which comes with onboard Crystal 4280/4297-sound chip.
Gigabyte
Gigabyte asked me to point out that their BX2000 Slot1-BX-motherboard has its dual BIOS-feature not for some stupid reason, but to reduce their RMAs. Obviously 50% of their RMAs were due to a destroyed or incorrectly flashed BIOS chip, and with the dual BIOS feature this problem could be sorted out. Gigabyte is also very proud on their own K7-board design and I hope to have soon the chance and test it with a revision C K7.
Iwill
Iwill’s latest motherboards are now offering the jumperless adjustment of the CPU frequencies as well as the CPU core voltage and the I/O-voltage. This could make them very interesting for overclockers.
Iwill’s PC133-solution is called VD133 and it’s also using the VIA 693(A) chipset.
Iwill, with its tradition of supplying motherboards with onboard-SCSI, is also offering a broad range of SCSI controllers that might be worth having a look at.
Epox
Epox is currently shipping two motherboards with VIA’s Apollo Pro + chipset, code number 693. One of the two motherboards is for Slot1, the other for Socket370. The Apollo Pro + is the ‘Intel-accepted’ version of the PC133 chipset, which is not allowed to claim that it can do 133 MHz FSB due to legal reasons between VIA and Intel until Coppermine will be launched. Nevertheless, the two boards that go by the name EP-3VBA and EP-6VBA can of course be ran at 133 MHz FSB as well as memory clock whilst the AGP is running at the specified 66 MHz. This is not possible with Intel’s BX-chipset, as you certainly remember. The finally official PC133-motherboard with VIA’s 693(A) chipset will be called P2-133A.
MSI
MSI will have a K7-motherboard available at K7-launch and they’ve got a PC133-platform ready as well, which goes by the name MS-6163VA. As in case of all the others, this motherboard will also use the VIA 693(A) chipset.
QDI
QDI’s solution is called ‘TwinMagic’ and seems even cooler to me. So far you cannot purchase the dual Socket370 card for Slot1 on its own, you have to get the BX-motherboard with it. This makes sense though, because not every single BX-motherboard supports dual-CPU operations, dual operation requires a special ASIC on the board.
We will see which solution proves to be better. Abit has the advantage of providing less sensitive connectors, the CPUs are directly plugged into the board. On the other hand, the QDI-solution is less wasteful. The single BX-motherboard can still be used for any current Intel P6-CPU, either by directly plugging it in to the Slot1 or via a converter card. If Intel removes the AN15-bonding wire from the Celeron PPGA CPUs it doesn’t become quite as pointless as the Abit BP6. Anyway, I’d like to congratulate each of the two board makers for their innovative idea, which won’t make them a lot of friends within Intel though.
Soyo
Soyo was offering a really interesting product, the SY-6BA+IV. This Slot1-BX-motherboard comes with all kind of tasty overclocking features (29 combinations of FSB and PCI bus frequencies), but its real highlight is the ATA-66 RAID feature, which enables you to run up to 8 EIDE drives in several different RAID configurations. Be sure that this is one of the first boards that we’ll test!
Soyo will also do a range of PC133 motherboards based on the VIA 693(A) chipset, produced under license by ETEQ. The Slot1-ATX solution will be called SY-6VBA133.
TMC
Besides a very good Socket7 product, TMC is supplying a really impressive solution for Slot1 and Socket370-motherboards. The TI6NBF+ is a Slot1-motherboard that can be equipped with Intel’s BX, ZX or with VIA’s 693(A) chipset. Thus it doesn’t take a different design for each chipset. Each of the three alternatives is offering 6 PCI Masters, achieved with an additional PCI-bridge. Thus even the ZX-version can run 6 PCI-masters, the only difference to the other two options is one missing DIMM-slot, since ZX only supports two. The TI7NBF offers the same idea for Socket370. There will also be a dedicated solution for PC133, the TI6VG4.
TMC’s TI6NBF+ motherboard.
