A-Z Manufacturers: Motherboards page
August 2003
I swear this business moves faster with every year that passes, it's getting impossible to keep up!
*Mutter*
*Deep sigh*
Anyway, I'm happy as the proverbial Larry with my rock solid Abit IC7-G based system and firmly recommending it to all and sundry. Yet for all the money I threw at it I'm probably going to religate "this old thing" to the kids for "legacy" games when I upgrade next year.
Well D'oh...
Actually, I don't "need to upgrade" and probably won't "need" to upgrade for years, but I'm a hardware and systems consultant at the end of the day and every fibre of my instincts is drooling at the thought of getting my hands of next years technology.
Way to go to CTO (5th August 2003) for finally catching up to me :p
Sooo...
Hmmmm?
What already ? There's a fine line between genius and madness and I was just contemplating which side of the fence to sit on after twenty years in this game...
OK OK. This is the score. Your shiny new PC is about to become a doorstop and anything less that a P4 is firmly going to the typing pool, secretary or your youngest niece....
Don't get me wrong, a 486 is just as useful as the latest P4 if all you do is the odd letter and maybe check email once a month, but let's face it, apart from technophones, the more you use computers, the more you use them. We've got a houseful and I'm still trying to sneak a full rack mount past the wife! And whatever you have now, it facing the same future as the ISA based 386's and 486's!
Mutter. I'm losing some of you, I can see your eyes glazing over. Time for a history lesson. Thing of it like this - computers are Lego. A decade or so back things where far far less integrated for a start and were physically different...
- Bus / card slots
- You had 8 and 16 bit ISA (and EISA and MCI) which where totally replaced by PCI and AGP (after a play with VL-Bus)
- Storage
- Massive MFM drives moved through RLL (etc) be entirely replaced by IDE
5¼" 360Kb's become the standard 3½" floppies in every system (now themselves considered legacy!)
- Memory
- Miniscule (kb) and delicate SIPP's gave way to (Mb) SIMM's to be utterly replaced by todays (Gb) DIMM's
I could go on, but you get the drift. well, todays P4 class and earlier are about to face the same extinction next year. It won't happen overnight, any more that the last revolution did, but here's the gist...
Contrary to what a number of resellers believe (read "too busy panicking about cashflow to see the tide turn") and other supposed consultants (often with conflicting interests, or plain quacks), here's what WILL happen, following on the release of Intel Grantsdales chipset based motherboard and tie in technologies. (With apologies and acknowledgements to AMD who I don't follow closely)
SD-RAM, already largely replaced by DDR will be replaced by DDR-II (Early engineering samples are 512Mb, planned up to 16Gb!)
PCI will be wholly replaced by PCI Express (1x or faster)
AGP will be utterly replaced by PCI Express (16x predominently)
IDE (including CD-ROM's) will be wholly replaced by (ever faster standards of) Serial ATA
CD-ROM's and CD-Writers etc will be replaced by SATA DVD-Roms and writers
It goes without saying that the motherboard, CPU's, CPU socket and chipsets will radically evolve too.
All this will begin early summer 2004, June or July from a retail point of view and the roll-out will be far faster than the creeping change from ISA to PCI. To be honest, I'm no electrical engineer and most of the detailed stuff I read in the white papers is way over my head, but I do know this industry inside out and this will steam roll in. There's literally no hurdles from a licencing or manufacturing cost point of view and there's a massive - truly massive - boost in performance which I believe will kickstart the industry from the doldrums of the past few years.
In corporate terms (read open cheque book volume purchasing) the movers and shakers (Linux and MS licensing issues aside) are waiting on Microsoft XP killer, code named Longhorn, as there's a lot of under the bonnet security work. My feeling (and - smugly - I'm rarely wrong) is that "Longhorn will cause the stampede from NT." Anything that's been running NT awhile will choke on Longhorn's hardware requirements, so Dell, IBM, HP and co. will be dining the corporate buyers all round.
In early adopters terms (read avid gamers and the overclocking fraternity) they will take look at the benchmarks (*mutters* hopefully without cheating video drivers) and beat down the doors of the (few remaining true) computer resellers to get their sweaty hands on one.
In mass market terms (read first purchase, replacement placement and high street presence) this will kick off around September 2004. I expect Intel will be advertising heavily and pushing the digital media message. Fact is, the PC prices point (£999, £1499 etc) never really change but this time around they will be an order of magnitude faster than anything the general public can imagine. I dare say the sales staff at DSG will be as ignorant as ever but the rolling demos will be so jaw droppingly good they'll just have to grunt agreements as they steer you towards an extended warranty. *cough*
May 2003
For some reason the price reductions appear to have come early, go figure. I estimated a price around £289 ex vat and it came in at £287.50 or better. I'm allowing for dollar fluctuactions being out but £1.50... Damn but I'm good!
Anyway, a few things to sort out then I'll get all the parts in a do a few review myself. Can't wait!
April 2003
*Jumps up and down all excited*
I laying in wait for the 1200FSB PCI-Express boards due around next Feb, if not sooner but I'm in need of upgrades yesterday and I finally got to play with a few 800Mhz FSB i875 Canterwood boards and the lesser i865 Springdales and they are available to buy now! Only a pity I have to wait for May 11th to order the processor, 12th really, that being a Monday an' all...
At the moment I can't decide between the Abit, ASUS and Gigabyte flavours, but I'm learning towards the Gigabyte myself. Generally the high end Canterwood are much of a muchness with support for 8 USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, Gigabit LAN and SATA RAID. After that it's down to individual preferences
Neither Soltek nor Asus have info on their websites, but I know they both have boards ready. The new Soltek brochures include full details of the i865-P, i865-PE and i865-G motherboards. QDI supposedly have them, but couldn't be bothered showing them at a recent trade show. I'm no fan of Legend boards in any case! I think Intels own reference boards are still covered by a NDA, so there's no info coming from the horses mouth until next month. If you like Intel's on boards, a breakdown of them can be had at XBit Labs
April 13th 2003
The following (other companies have details of Canterwood and Springdale boards:
AOpen. Apparently their AX4C Max will overclock to 1600Mhz! (But maybe not if you use SATA)
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