Introduction
It’s June again and this means for me flying over to Asia to attend my favorite IT trade show, Computex, in Taiwan. The reason why I favor Computex over shows like CeBIT or Comdex is pretty simple. Neither Las Vegas/USA nor Hannover/Germany can quite do it for me, while Taipei is a rather exciting place. I’ve always got the chance to visit my favorite town in the world, Hong Kong, and my No.2, Bangkok, in that time as well, and the mountains around Taipei are also worth a visit every time I am here. The show itself is not as huge as CeBIT and even a bit smaller than Comdex, so that you can save your feet whilst being very effective in getting to your meetings on time. The companies here supply you with a lot of information rather than tons of marketing crap, which is saving my nerves at the same time. My ‘affinity’ to the Asian people and culture is already quite known as well, which makes reason number 5 why I am enjoying my stay here every year again.
Tom’s Hardware’s Computex Team
In the last months the staff of Tom’s Hardware Guide has grown quite nicely, so that two of our excellent editors could join me on this trip to Taipei.
Frank used to work for Ziff-Davis Germany and we are very proud that we could win this very skilled and highly energetic journalist. He is already very well known and respected amongst the Taiwanese motherboard makers as a very thorough reviewer who has a deep passion to squeeze the last bit of performance out of a system. Like myself, Frank is never afraid to use the soldering iron to make a motherboard obey his ideas. We both share the opinion that ‘impossible’ doesn’t exist, as long as you try hard enough.
You might have noticed that Tom’s Hardware Guide has finally been able to provide you the timely, well-researched and continuous service that I’ve promised you so many times in the past. Thanks to you readers and my excellent team this website has grown way beyond my projections in the last six months. May 2000 was another best month in the history of Tom’s Hardware Guide and we were able to extend our leadership role in the hardware reviewer scene significantly. With 19.8 million served html-pages last month we could almost reach the magic 20 million mark, while all other hardware websites are still struggling to skip 10 million pages. These numbers are actually not fictional like the numbers claimed by many others. Tom’s Hardware Guide is audited by a well-respected independent auditing firm and our numbers are publicly available. I am convinced that June 2000 will be even better, since we are currently averaging more than 700,000 pages/day. Therefore I would like to take the opportunity and thank all our faithful readers for their continuous support and trust. I’d also like to send a very special ‘hello’ to the ‘Fifth Continent’ or ‘Down Under’! Australia has become country number two in our readership statistic after the United States of America. Tom’s Hardware seems to have a large fan club in this beautiful part of the world and so I would like to express my warmest greetings to all my Australian readers. Your faith in all of us means a whole lot to me! Finally I want to send my regards to our readers from Tonga. I was amazed when Tonga started showing up in my web-stats a long time ago. Now I am very proud to see that we seem to have a whole lot of readers in this paradise of the Southern Pacific.
HOT NEWS – QDI Enables Thunderbird Overclocking
The launch of AMD’s new ‘Thunderbird‘ or officially ‘Athlon with performance-enhancing cache memory’ is only a few days ago and we already could find out how to overclock this powerful processor. Several of Thunderbird’s ‘non-documented’ pins replace the ‘golden fingers’ of the ‘Athlon Classic’. QDI is the first motherboard maker that will enable the user to make usage of those pins to adjust Thunderbird’s multiplier. QDI’s upcoming Kinetiz 7T motherboard will have the following feature:
Ain’t that sweet? We will try and test this board as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more information on this issue.
AOpen
As in case of most other motherboard makers, AOpen is introducing their i815-solutions AX3S and AX3S Pro. The latter of the two adds the DIE-HARD BIOS, which basically is AOpen’s version of a dual-BIOS solution, keeping you from running into trouble if your Flash update should fail. The ‘Pro’ comes also with all the overclocking features many of you love and it has AOpen’s new ‘Dr.LED’-feature, which is able to show you the reason of a failed boot process via 8 different LEDs on the board or in an optional panel on the front of your computer system. AOpen is also supporting AMD’s new SocketA-processors with their upcoming AK33 motherboard, using VIA’s KT133 chipset.
On the 3D graphics side, AOpen is very proud on their new PA256 Deluxe graphics card, which is using NVIDIA’s GeForce 2 GTS chip. You certainly remember the review of the PA256 card, which proved that AOpen is able to supply a good GeForce 2 solution. The new ‘Deluxe’-version adds some very nifty features. With the kewl slogan “Liberate the soul of VGA” AOpen is marketing their new OpenBIOS feature for the PA256 Deluxe. OpenBIOS gives you the chance to adjust a huge amount of settings of GeForce 2 GTS right at boot up. Instead of hitting the ‘DEL’-key and getting into the motherboard BIOS, you hit ‘INS’ and enter this screen:
AOpen, Continued
You can see that you can indeed play around with a lot of settings, which are perfect for people who like to overclock their GeForce 2 card. Once on the Windows98 desktop, you can run OpenBIOS as well, using this interface:
Furthermore, AOpen gives novice users the chance to check the BIOS and driver version of their GeForce 2 card and update it automatically from their website using ‘LiveUpdate‘, similar to Microsoft’s ‘Windows Update’.
Another feature of AOpen’s new PA256 Deluxe will be a very big cooling solution, which we saw in its prototype version.
You can see the special copper heat pipe that distributes the heat of the chip over the whole heat sink
SiS
SiS was presenting their new integrated Ahtlon/Duron chipset SiS730S to us, which integrates virtually everything except of a coffee maker. Have a look for yourself:
At the same time they reminded me of their SiS630S chipset, which offers the same features as 730S for Intel Socket370 CPUs.
We were also informed about the development of the SiS310 and SiS315 3D chip. I was surprised to see that 310 will have integrated T&L and all the other cool features to compete in today’s graphics market. Still both chips won’t offer tremendously high fill rate, so that you won’t find them in the high-end range of 3D chips once they are released. However, 310/315 could be an interesting low-cost 3D-solution.
FIC
First of all I was surprised to see that the mysterious Compaq-motherboard that had been shipped in AMD’s Thunderbird evaluation units is actually nothing but a slightly modified version of FIC’s brand new AZ11 SocketA-motherboard.
You can find more information about this motherboard at FIC’s website.
‘FS31’ is the name of FIC’s upcoming i815 motherboard, which will be very interesting as well, although it only seems to come as MicroATX.
Another interesting product from FIC is the upcoming Aqua 3200 web pad, powered by Transmeta’s Crusoe processor.
You might remember how much I liked the Cyrix prototype web pad that was shown at Comdex 1998. Now it finally seems to become reality. Unfortunately the Aqua model at FIC’s booth was not functional yet, but it’s supposed to be released in Q3 this year. Find out more about it here.
Last but not least I’d like to mention FIC’s Bluetooth Module that enables wireless home networking. Unfortunately I didn’t get any in-depth press information about it and I couldn’t find it at FIC’s website as well.
Q-Lity
You might not be too familiar with Q-Lity, which is a daughter of Taiwan’s Quanta Corporation. Quanta is very big in the OEM business and the second largest notebook manufacturer in the world. Notebooks from DELL are actually manufactured by Quanta, and Business Week ranks them the No.14 of the Top100 IT companies in the world, just 4 places behind Microsoft.
Q-Lity is Quanta’s brand for retail motherboards and flat panels. The motherboards are developed by a team with huge engineering resources. Q-Lity claims that it has no less than 420 R&D engineers alone and excellent high-tech production facilities that can deliver several hundred thousand customized motherboards/day.
At Q-Lity’s booth I was particularly impressed by their CPV4-TD dual FC-PGA Pentium III motherboard with VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset. They showed it running rock stable at 155 MHz FSB and with 2 GB of memory, which requires special engineering because VIA supports only 1.5 GB of memory for this chipset.
Q-Lity is also offering an i815-solution called CP815E-TL and a SocketA motherboard for Thunderbird and Duron with KT133 chipset by the name of K7VT-T.
OK, so far about my first impressions. I’ve got to run to my next appointments and will continue with my Computex report later on. We’ve got a lot more hot things to tell and can also offer something very special that only Tom’s Hardware Guide can bring you from this year’s Computex/Taipei. Stay tuned!
Follow-up by reading the article ‘AMD’s Thunderbird finally fully fledged‘.
