Motherboards in 2002: Preview from Comdex

ABIT

ABIT was one of the very few manufacturers to continue to have a presence on the Comdex show floor. Their booth wasn't anything extravagant but at the same time it definitely wasn't cheap to setup. The mentality behind their decision was that no one will ever see you if you're not easily found, hopefully it worked out for the best for them.

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As you'll remember from our Computex 2001 coverage, ABIT was one of the five launch partners for NVIDIA's nForce chipset. ABIT's NV-22 will be sampling to OEMs before the end of the year but ABIT has yet to make the final decision as to whether or not they will release the board into retail channels. Currently ABIT's roadmap actually places the nForce chipset below the VIA KT266A in terms of performance and reliability; while this may change as time goes on it is clearly an indication that the launch of the nForce chipset has not gone as smoothly as originally planned.

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Much more interesting to AnandTech readers will be ABIT's first KT266A motherboard, the KR7A-RAID. The KR7A-RAID brings to the table everything that you're used to seeing from ABIT plus a total of four DIMM slots. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish from an engineering standpoint yet ABIT has put in the extra effort to guarantee their board's operation with all four DIMM slots populated. We'll test this functionality for sure as soon as the board arrives in our San Jose motherboard testing lab next week.

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Here we have the KS7 which uses the upcoming SiS 745 chipset. The SiS 745 chipset is very similar to the 735 with official support for DDR333 SDRAM. For the Athlon, without an equivalent increase in FSB frequency, the move to DDR333 SDRAM shouldn't provide a tangible performance increase making the 745 nothing special.

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ABIT also had a board based on AMD's 760MPX chipset which as you will recall is an updated version of the 760MP chipset launched in June. The MPX adds support for a 64-bit/66MHz PCI bus through the use of a new AMD 768 South Bridge. ABIT is targeting this board at the server/workstation market and not the enthusiast crowd; so it's unknown whether it will feature ABIT's classic overclocking features. ABIT is toying with the idea of releasing an enthusiast class board later on.