Q4 Motherboard and Graphics: Tour de Taiwan
 

We recently had the opportunity to visit some manufacturers in Taiwan, and with that opportunity, we spent a lot of time previewing new motherboards and graphics products. Below, you can see a little bit of what several vendors have to offer for the remaining portion of Q4 and Q1’06.

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/...ize=yes&i=2586

here are few interesting blurps from the full article

ASUS also had a few glimpses of their dual G70 card for us; individually numbered 1 through 2000 for each lucky reviewer. A dual R520 card is in the works based on the same design.

Interestingly enough, ASRock was the only company on our Tour de Taiwan that had prototype M2 Socket 940 motherboards on display. AMD has a bit of work to do before M2 is ready; ASRock and other companies confirmed with us that M2 is in very early silicon still and benchmarking at this point would not be representative of the final product. Traditionally, late Q3 is a key launch window for AMD.

The big news at MSI was its demonstration of a high end motherboard featuring a Sound Blaster Audigy2 instead of a Live! chip. Our tests have all shown that the nForce4 motherboards that use the SB Live! processor perform much better than motherboards based on the Realtek ALC850, since less processing is offloaded from the DSP to the CPU. MSI and ASUS representatives hinted that a lower cost, smaller footprint Audigy chip for onboard audio is in the works, but there is no word yet on adoption

Gigabyte’s Quad graphics motherboard stirred up a lot of attention over the last few weeks. In fact, once Gigabyte heard that Matrox has plans for a triple-headed PCIe graphics card, the thought of twelve displays on a single motherboard made even the most senior engineer drool.


A few weeks ago, we saw the first T-Series motherboard from Biostar, the C51G based TForce 6100-939. Biostar’s entire T-Series lineup is gunning for DFI and Abit in the “extreme overclocker” category. High voltage jumpers and a full lineup of easy BIOS saving options certainly give Biostar a lot more bang for the buck than what we’ve been accustomed to. Biostar’s first attempt at a DFI-killer looks like a pretty good one - the Biostar TForce4 SLI


the picture below is from a Gigabyte Intel board