Price Guides November 2003: CPU and Motherboards

With AMD’s choice to move the memory controller onto the processor, northbridge manufacturers are starting to look more and more the same. While this might look bad if you are NVIDIA or VIA, guys like ALi and SiS are smiling all the way to the bank.

SiS’s biggest partner, ECS, can mass produce OEM boards for Athlon 64 systems using their SiS 755 chipset at a significant lower cost.  Some of these boards are showing up here and there, but you probably won’t see many in Fry’s anytime soon.  Unless you’re a large ECS fan, you’ll probably never even seen SiS 755 in the USA.

Ali is another story entirely, even though they have been pretty dormant these last years they have done a lot of work into the M1683 chips.  Again you will not see this chipset in volume outside of OEM sales, and even some retail sales at Albatron, ECS and a few other manufacturers have signed on with ALi.