ALi in 2001: DDR SDRAM for all

As far as Socket-462 (Socket-A) motherboards go, we saw boards from: ASUS, Arima Comp, Chaintech, EPoX, Gigabyte, Iwill, MITAC, PC Chips, Soyo, and Transcend.  They all used the MAGiK 1 / M1535D+ combination.

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This is MITAC, Inc’s 6616AX.  Notice the silkscreen area for another chip near the Southbridge as well as the silkscreened connectors near the lower right edge of the picture.  It looks like this will be used as a SCSI option which would make the 6616AX the second board that supported the Athlon to boast such a feature.  The first being the Microstar K7T Master we reviewed back in September.

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This is Gigabyte’s GA-7AM micro-ATX motherboard that uses the MAGiK 1 chipset.  Notice the inclusion of no more than 2 DIMM slots.  With the traces to the memory banks now required to cope with twice as much data transfer, don’t be surprised to see some full ATX as well as micro-ATX solutions resort to using 2 DIMM slots.

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Here we have Iwill’s KA266 which we saw as the only MAGiK 1 based board at Computex 2000 in Taipei.  Its layout is extremely similar to that of the KV200-R that we reviewed not too long ago. 

Iwill does have another version of the KA266, called the KA266-R, that adds IDE RAID support however with the M1535D+ Southbridge already boasting ATA/100 support there’s very little need for a third party solution unless you absolutely must have RAID support.