The show goes on...

In this article we've got more pictures of NVIDIA's G70, pictures of all of the CrossFire motherboards from manufacturers at the show, a look at cooling at Computex, benchmarks of ULi's new Socket-939 chipset and much more.

A view of Taipei by the Taiwan World Trade Center and Taipei 101

If you haven't already, be sure to check out coverage from earlier in the week:

Computex 2005 Early Bird Coverage: NVIDIA's G70, Athlon 64 BTX and more
ATI's Multi-GPU Solution: CrossFire
Computex 2005 Day 1 - ATI R520 Sighting, NVIDIA's new Chipset

More from Gigabyte

Gigabyte's i-RAM card generated quite a bit of interest in our Early Bird Computex Coverage, so we decided to bring you all some more pictures and information about the solution.

As we alluded to in our initial article, the i-RAM card features 4 DIMM slots and supports DDR200 DIMMs. You can use faster memory but it will only run at DDR200.

Below you can see the i-RAM card populated and in action:

ULi - The Best Kept Secret of Taiwan?

About two years ago failing chipset maker ALi dropped out of the chipset business and a spinoff, ULi, took over.  ALi reached the height of their popularity during the Socket-7 days, but when Intel transitioned to their Slot-1 architecture ALi began to lose ground.  While ALi was one of the first to show working Athlon 64 chipsets, their K8 solutions were hardly adopted and thus the market was given away to SiS, VIA and of course, NVIDIA. 

ULi’s existence was supposed to change all of that.  Focusing on stability and reliability, two issues that ALi’s chipsets proved to have later on in their life, ULi was determined to create a chipset business that would be among the best. 

Currently ULi has manufacturers like ASUS, ABIT and ECS making boards based on their chipsets, yet none of the sales people from those companies will sell ULi based motherboards into the North American and European markets.  In the Chinese markets, the ULi based boards sell extremely well.  The chipsets themselves are priced lower than VIA’s, yet are quite competitive with NVIDIA’s nForce4 Ultra solution.  The problem is branding; ULi has no brand recognition in the Europe and North American markets, thus selling motherboards based on their chipsets becomes quite difficult. 

We took a look at a ULi Socket-939 PCI Express reference board while in Taiwan to see if what ULi was telling us happened to be true.  Could ULi’s chipsets offer performance close to that of NVIDIA, while also offering stability at a price point lower than VIA’s? 

We ran a small suite of tests on ASUS’ AN8-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI) as well as ULi’s Socket-939 PCI Express Reference Motherboard.  The performance of the chipset was quite compelling; faster than the nForce4 in Doom 3, yet slower in the Winstone tests. 

Overall performance was quite respectable, but most importantly was that we encountered no problems during our testing.  Overclocking features were limited on the reference board, but we’re hearing that ABIT has a board based on ULi’s chipset that should offer some pretty good overclocking performance. 

One particularly nice feature of the ULi chipset is that its South Bridge offers a full speed AGP 8X interface - and the North/South Bridges communicate over a 8GB/s Hyper Transport bus, meaning that there’s no reduction in performance if you use an AGP graphics card on the motherboard.  By offering both AGP and PCI Express slots, both of which run at full speed, you can have a single motherboard that will support your current AGP graphics card and any later on PCI Express cards without sacrificing any performance. 

The Current M1567 South Bridge has full AGP 8X Support

The Spec list of the M1695 ULi chipset

Currently ULi has the manufacturer support they need, they simply need to be able to improve brand recognition it seems.  With the right combination of getting their name out there and a solid enthusiast-level motherboard, ULi could very well be the chipset manufacturer to pick up where VIA left off. 

The new M1575 South Bridge will add SATA II support

Current pricing for Socket-939 motherboards based on the ULi chipset appears to be at the sub-$80 level, which isn’t bad at all for a nForce4 Ultra competitor. 

ULi also makes most of the South Bridges for ATI based motherboards

We saw ULi boards from a few manufacturers at the show; ECS' board looked a lot like ULi's reference design and will carry a street price of around $75:

Jetway also had a motherboard on display:

While ASUS and ABIT also have boards, we did not get a chance to take a look at them at the show.

More G70 Pictures

We were able to get some more pictures of NVIDIA's G70 GPU at the show:

ATI CrossFire Motherboards

Although most of the CrossFire demos running at the show were running on ATI Reference Boards, other manufacturers did have their boards on display.

ASUS is only making an Intel CrossFire board, pictured below:

DFI has a particularly impressive AMD CrossFire board; even ATI was surprised that they had it up and running with so little time with the chipset. Note the lack of any legacy Parallel or Serial ports:

Although it was covered by a heatsink, DFI will try to use ATI's South Bridge for their motherboard because of pressure from ATI.

Gigabyte's AMD CrossFire board still uses a selector card like the nForce4 SLI boards in order to cut costs:

Note the use of the ULi South Bridge on the Gigabyte board above.

Last, but not least, MSI had their AMD based CrossFire board on display as well:

 

Shuttle Introduces 945G and Pentium M SFFs

Despite the declining interest in SFFs from other manufacturers, Shuttle had a strong showing of SFF systems based on all of the latest chipsets.

First the obligatory 945G based SFF:

Of course the 945G based SFF does support Intel's Pentium D processors:

Quite possibly the more interesting SFF was the new Pentium M based SFF from Shuttle:

And once more we got to see Shuttle's HTPC SFF also built around the Pentium M processor:

Both Pentium M SFFs use the Intel 915GM chipset.

We mentioned in our first coverage of Shuttle's Pentium M solution at CES that the solution was going to launch with support for a CableCard reader. The CableCard reference design is complete and is ready to go into the next version of Media Center Edition, however it seems that concerns over DRM are preventing it from coming to market. Despite the product being done, it doesn't look like this XPC will be able to launch with CableCard support by the end of this year.

PowerColor's Wall of ATI GPUs

PowerColor's parent company TUL had tons of ATI GPUs and ATI based motherboards on display at the show. Among the most notable were the following:

PowerColor's completely passively cooled X800 XL graphics card:

The ATI Radeon X550 also made an appearance at PowerColor's booth. From what we have seen, the X550 is just basically a higher clocked X300. Whether or not the higher clock justifies the name change is another discussion entirely.

The final card of interest at PowerColor was their Theater 550 Pro based TV tuner. Our recent TV Tuner Comparison showed ATI's Theater 550 Pro offered the absolute best image quality out of any analog TV tuner.

Tul was a launch partner for ATI's CrossFire chipset, however all of the static motherboards on display at their booth were vanilla Radeon Xpress 200 boards.

A Tul Socket-754 Radeon Xpress 200 motherboard, note the use of the ULi South Bridge

Tul did have an ATI reference CrossFire system running:

Water Cooling at the Show

Just about every manufacturer we talked to seemed to be interested in bringing a water cooling solution to market by the end of this year.

Gigabyte showcased their water cooling solution:

Zalman was also demonstrating their new Reserator 1 Plus water cooling solution:

Impressive Cooling from Zalman

A little over a week ago in LA we met up with Zalman after E3 to talk about their new products. Back then they told us that they were working on a new CPU cooler, the 9500, that would offer better cooling than any conventional cooler on the market.

At Computex, Zalman introduced their new cooler:

The heatsink uses 3 heat pipes that are looped around the circular cooler.

Here is a picture of the 9500 in use on an ASUS SLI motherboard:

Like all previous Zalman coolers, the 9500 will be available as both an AMD and Intel cooler.

Zalman was also showing off their TNN 300 chassis, a smaller version of their TNN 500. Like its bigger brother, the TNN 300 is entirely passively cooled using the chassis as a heatsink for the network of heat pipes that runs throughout the case:

Even the power supply is passively cooled; the PSU is contained within the left door of the TNN 300 as you can see from the picture below - the motherboard plugs into the door.

The 350W Power Supply can be seen here, the power supply will power any single GPU graphics card without any problems

Unfortunately, the case will only accept micro ATX motherboards, which will limit its success in the channel market. There have been a number of system builders that have expressed interest in offering Media Center PCs based on the new TNN 300 however.

Below you can see the TNN 300 and the larger TNN 500 in the background:

Like the TNN 500, the 300 will be quite expensive. The current target price is around $800, which is much better than the $1300 that the TNN 500 is selling for but still extremely expensive for a case.

The TNN 300 uses heat pipes to cool the graphics card and CPU as well, so the only component making noise in your system will be your HDD. Like the TNN 500, the TNN 300 is just plain silent.

ASUS Motherboards

As always, ASUS had a strong presence at the show.

First off was the entirely passively-cooled A8N-SLI Premium based on the nForce4 SLI chipset:

The use of a heat pipe to cool the chipset makes a lot of sense, and it ends up being cooler than a fan-based solution. Also note that the selector card has been ditched in favor of IC based switching.

On the rear I/O panel you will notice that there is a red external SATA port underneath the first two USB ports. External SATA is becoming increasingly more popular on motherboards these days.

ASUS also showcased a BTX form factor nForce4 SLI Intel Edition motherboard:

The final board we saw from ASUS was a dual Opteron board based on the nForce4 Professional chipset. ASUS indicated that the board would also have overclocking options, for those of you interested in Opteron workstation overclocking.

ABIT's nForce4 SLI Fatal1ty

ABIT was showing off their new nForce4 SLI Fatal1ty board:

Just like their previous Fatal1ty motherboards, ABIT moved the on-board audio onto a separate card to reduce interference and improve sound quality:

The uGuru panel also ships with the board and now occupies a 5.25" drive bay. The panel features a CMOS reset button, which can be quite useful.

AOpen's new Pentium M Motherboard

There wasn't too much from AOpen on the show, but their 915GM based Pentium M motherboard was nice to see.

Tons of 945 Motherboards

Intel's 945 chipset was by far the most popular chipset at the show, below are some examples of boards based on the chipset:

Chaintech's 945

Foxconn had many 945 boards on display

Gigabyte's 945 features 2 PCI Express x16 slots

Gigabyte's BTX 945 board

More MSI on BTX

We've already covered MSI's solutions in depth in this article and in our earlier Computex articles, but they also happened to have a 915 based BTX motherboard on display that we found interesting:

There is beginning to be a pretty severe shortage of Intel 8xx and 915 chipsets, so we'd expect designs like this to transition to 945 very quickly. Also remember that MSI presented us with the world's first BTX Athlon 64 Motherboard earlier this week.

Foxconn the Quiet

Most folks aren't aware of exactly how large of a motherboard manufacturer Foxconn is, but make no mistake - Foxconn is one of the largest motherboard manufacturers around today. The difference is that Foxconn has very poor presence in the channel, which means that the majority of the enthusiast market isn't really exposed to their motherboards.

Quality and reliability are top notch for Foxconn, as their products are used by all of the major OEMs, but they have always fallen short of offering good enthusiast-class motherboards.

Given that Foxconn is a major OEM motherboard manufacturer it is no surprise to see a BTX motherboard at their booth:

The 945G7UB-8KS2 is a fairly standard 945G based motherboard, but it happens to be built in accordance to the micro-BTX specification.

Tyan

Tyan had a collection of multiprocessor Opteron solutions at their booth:

Dual Opterons using the nForce4 Professional chipset:

Single Opteron using the nForce4 Professional chipset:

Tyan also had a number of Intel solutions at their booth, including this Intel board with two PCI Express x16 slots:

Jetway and their Unique Motherboards

Jetway had a number of unique boards at their booth; first off, there was a motherboard that featured both Socket-939 and Socket-754 support. Obviously you can either use one or the other, but it still offers a good deal of flexibility.

ECS had a similar design about a year ago, so it's nothing too new but it is still interesting to see.

Jetway also showcased a Socket-939 PCI Express motherboard based on VIA's K8T890 chipset:

The K8T890 has been having a lot of problems according to motherboard makers, which explains why we have yet to see any real availability of boards based on the chipset.

Below is Jetway's Socket-754 motherboard with both PCI Express and AGP support:

The peculiar thing about this motherboard is that it is based on NVIDIA's nForce4 chipset, which doesn't support AGP. We didn't see any other chips on the motherboard, so we can only assume that the AGP slot is little more than a PCI slot with a different connector.

Final Words

We've already covered the vast majority of the show, but there is still more to come - including our annual industry report based on feedback from manufacturers at the show.