Q4 Motherboard and Graphics: Tour de Taiwan

MSI

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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. Below, you can see the new ultra high end AMD board from MSI – the dual X16 K8N Diamond Plus – complete with a C51D bridge and heat pipe.

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MSI was also very proud to show off working X1800XL cards. We are still waiting for retail shipments of a lot of these cards, but manufacturers claim that ATI is still in allocation.

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MSI also has an X850 Crossfire card, and what better way to run that X850 Crossfire card than with an MSI Crossfire motherboard. Expect to see MSI’s RD480 board any day now.

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Like virtually all other manufacturers (other than DFI), the RD480 Neo2 features a ULi south bridge.

Gigabyte

The board that immediately caught our eye at Gigabyte was their new 975X board with a radically new cooling design. Rather than rely on the chassis to generate enough airflow over the Northbridge and mosfets, Gigabyte decided to condense and remove some of the legacy devices from the I/O backports and use that space for small, powerful fans instead. These fans draw air over the core logic and mosfets via a plastic tunnel system, and then exhaust where we are typically accustomed to seeing PS/2 or other legacy device outputs. Such a design is good for cooling, but your ears may not approve.

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MSI isn’t the only motherboard manufacturer sporting the new onboard Audigy chips. Gigabyte’s newest touts the same Audigy2 featured on MSI’s high end motherboards. When we asked if there were plans in the future for other Creative based chips, most product managers agreed that interference across the motherboard PCB is beginning to be a problem. The expansion audio cards already produce less interference over onboard chips, and higher quality sound may require the use of a sound module to avoid interference.

Gigabyte is already working on 945GM/GT and will likely become the first to the retail channel with motherboards. Intel’s Mobile on Desktop (MOD) doesn’t seem to have much support from other manufacturers, although everyone likes to talk about it. Gigabyte, on the other hand, is clearly putting its money where its mouth is. While AOpen and DFI are traditionally the only vendors to bring MOD products to market, Gigabyte seems ready to embrace MOD as well.

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.

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Gigabyte also has several new DDR2 based video cards and new cooling technologies. As we’ve mentioned a few times before, DDR2 is actually cheaper than DDR1 on the spot market, so low clock video cards that use DDR1 will start using DDR2 all across the board, not just at Gigabyte. More details on this soon!