Motherboards in 2001 Preview: Part 2

Conclusion

There you go. That's our peek at what we can expect from different motherboard manufacturers over the next few months. Unfortunately, we were not able to visit ASUS and Soyo at Comdex, so we do not have full details on what they will be releasing. We do know that ASUS has a Pentium 4 board ready to go, as well as DDR solutions based on VIA, ALi, and AMD chipsets.

The most obvious thing for the next few months is that it will be the era of DDR and a lot of manufacturers see the opportunities that go along with this new era. VIA and ALi released chipsets supporting DDR SDRAM for Intel and AMD processors. At the same time, AMD also has their 760 chipset ready to couple their processors to DDR memory. All the companies we visited have at least one kind of DDR motherboard, and most of them actually have several different models to reach different markets.

Motherboards using the Intel i850 chipset will be available soon to support the recently launched Pentium 4. However, supplies will be quite limited for the time being due to high costs. One of the reasons behind those high costs is the expensive RDRAM memory that is required for use on these boards. With the i820 all but a complete failure, companies have become a bit more cautious when it comes to dealing with anything RDRAM related. The other problem is the high cost of the i850 chipset itself, as well as the strict PCB requirements that conspire to make i850 boards cost double or triple that of boards based on other chipsets.

Gigabyte and Microstar jumped out to be the first two manufacturers to demonstrate i850 solutions. ASUS should also be one of the first to market with their P4T, and of course Intel has their own design that will mainly show up in OEM systems. We did learn that most other companies would soon release their i850 motherboards, or at least are planning to do so early next year.

Despite all this new technology, there is still a huge market for VIA KT133 and Intel i815E motherboards. We're seeing fewer motherboards with the original versions of these chipsets, but rather a lot of movement towards the reduced cost or more integrated VIA KL133, VIA KM133, VIA PL133, VIA PM133, and the Intel i815EP variants.

In short, we expect to see a very competitive motherboard market again next year, both at the high-end and low-end. We will continue to follow up with each company in order to bring you reviews on all the latest products as they become available.