FIRST LOOK: ULi M1695 PCIe/AGP Socket 939 for Athlon 64
by Wesley Fink on July 13, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
As we reported form Computex, the talk of the show was ATI's new Crossfire dual-video solution for AMD and Intel. Part of that talk was the development work done with ULi on the ATI South Bridge and the cross-compatibility of the ULi South Bridge using the ATI chipset. ULi is what remains of the ALi chipset division of Acer, and this now independent chipmaker has been very busy in several arenas. In addition to South Bridges which can work with the chipsets of other manufacturers, ULi also makes single-chip and dual-chip solutions for Athlon 64.
ATI certainly had the spotlight with their new chipset, but one of the newest and most interesting chipsets introduced at Computex was also from ULi - the M1695 HyperTransport PCI Express Tunnel Chip for AMD Athlon 64 platforms.
ATI certainly had the spotlight with their new chipset, but one of the newest and most interesting chipsets introduced at Computex was also from ULi - the M1695 HyperTransport PCI Express Tunnel Chip for AMD Athlon 64 platforms.
"M1695's innovative HyperTransport tunnel architecture integrates non-blocking symmetrical HyperTransportTM 2.0 links which enables motherboard manufacturers and system integrators to pair up M1695 with other high performance HyperTransport-based chipsets and bridge devices either natively or via the HTXTM connector. When coupled with ULi's M1567 south bridge, the combination offers motherboard manufacturers the unprecedented capability to support PCI Express x16, AGP 8X, PCI graphics cards simultaneously on the same mainboard. Such capability makes it possible to create a fully surrounding virtual reality environment using multiple high resolution displays driven by the three graphics technologies residing in the same computer system."
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Sabresiberian - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
Dang! I just bought an AGP mainboard! LOL! Well, I probably saved $100 and money was a concern for me.Glad to see this come out still, hats off to ULI :)
Wish it had come out 6 months or more ago, I think that would have been more timely, but better late than never, heh.
nserra - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
#Wesley FinkRepeating....
I noted that the speed of the AGP is very good, but vs the older 1689 is it equal, higher or is the 1689 even higher. Can you do some 939A8X-M test just to check?
Also your explanation to #20 is confusing (at least to me), isn’t HT (200x5) = 1000HT speed and the chipset can do 400 (2,3,4X400) ?
#28 I think Uli chipsets as been always one of the faster with hard disk transfers (a lot faster), the older don’t this I don’t know, also I don’t know the CPU % hit.
QV - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
This looks like an interesting board. When I found out that K8T890 doesn't support dual-core, I figured my next machine would be nF4, but this looks good enough that by the time I build my next machine (which will probably be months away, for money reasons), I may very well use a board based on this chipset.Also, speaking of dual AGP/PCI-E solutions, can't the VIA PT880 Pro do the same? I know it's for a different platform, but it doesn't seem to be a hack like some boards seem to use, and ASRock makes one or two boards based on it. What's the story there? Can the PT880 Pro really also do the triple graphics interface, and platform differences aside, how does it stack up against the M1695?
L3p3rM355i4h - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
Interesting. Hopefully it doesn't go the way of the KT890.MarkHark - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
Does anybody know if this ULI south bridge supports NCQ and how its hard drive I/O performance compares to Nforce4 and SIS?smn198 - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
#25 If I was after AGP with the possibility to upgrade to PCIe without changing motherboard then yes I would be interested but I doubt that this feature will interest OEMs. The cost of a full motherboard will be pushed up once features such as SATA2 and Gbit LAN are added. The possibility of two full x16 PCIe slots is the most interesting thing to me as it could add a bit of future proofing.I would be interested if it had been out a few months and I wasn't going to be an early adopter. I'd want to know what the drivers are like and no matter how good this chipset is, I doubt it's driver support will be as good as the nVidia. Good luck to them though! We need another high-end chipset maker for AMD.
Zebo - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
Abit and Gigabyte both have full-blown boards in the works.----------------
Well that certainly makes things interesting.. Thanks again.. And I take back my comment about DOA like SIS 75x seems to be:)
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
#25 - Competitive and much cheaper also works - with the unique AGP on PCIe to get your attention.smn198 - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
#15 - I agree but also, they don't need to show that they are as competitive as the nForce4, they need to be better.fishy - Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - link
Exciting news to me:
_I still have an 'ol Asus/ Ali motherboard
running, and it has been "very good to me" :)
_I'm still looking for a AMD 64 motherboard
(bought an NF4 board a few months ago
and got rid of it really fast, too many
problems)
Asus, get on this fast, please!