Provisional information on X850-based graphics cards
Albatron Technology introduces Albatron K8X890 Pro motherboard on on VIA K8T890 chipset
GA-K8NSP-SLI: Dual GPU support from Gigabyte
Provisional information on X850-based graphics cards
A number of web resources, PC Inpact in particular, shed some light on ATI X850 graphics cards. The series will include X850 XT Platinum, X850 XT and X850 PRO, all expected early in 2005.
X850 XT and X850 XT Platinum will feature an impressive coolers occupying two slots (on the photo), while the Pro´s cooler will traditionally fit into one. Prices might be $550 for Platinum, $500 for XT and $400 for Pro.
According to provisional informaiton, X850 XT Platinum GPU will operate at 540 MHz clock rate and card´s 256 MB of GDDR-3 memory will work at 590 MHz. X850 XT will have 16 pipelines 520/540 MHz clock rates. The Pro card will have the same clock rates, but only 12 pipelines.
Albatron Technology introduces Albatron K8X890 Pro motherboard on on VIA K8T890 chipset
Albatron Technology introduced its new motherboard on VIA K8T890 chipset — K8X890 Pro – designed for AMD Athlon 64 Socket 939 processors. Besides PCI Express x16 slot, the novelty has one PCI Express x4 slot, for which no cards have been seen in the market recently.
Other sockets include 4 x DIMM (dual-channel), 3 x PCI, 2 x Ultra ATA/133 headers, 2 x SATA (RAID 0/1). In its turn, VT8237 Southbridge offers up to 8 x USB 2.0 ports, 2 x IEEE 1394 ports, etc. The board has 8-channel Envy24PT audio and Marvell´s Gigabit Ethernet.
GA-K8NSP-SLI: Dual GPU support from Gigabyte
At "GIGABYTE EXPO 2004" in Japan GIGABYTE Technology introduced a number of its new products. GA-K8NSP-SLI of Triton series caught the most attention being based on NVIDIA´s nForce 4 SLI chipset.
Speaking of features comparing to ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, the novelty utilizes nForce 4 SLI at 100%, but generally repeats the functionality. GA-K8NSP-SLI supports IEEE 802.11g as well as DualBIOS, Dual Power System (D.P.S.) technologies. I wonder how their marketing specialists will promote SLI in the ads. If the strategy is not correct, this feature will be lost among other "Dual" innovations.
The testbed, showcasing the power of dual solutions, featured two GV-NX66T128D graphics cards based on GeForce 6600GT coupled with a rigid bridge.
Obviously, GIGABYTE´s SLI bridge won´t fit into an ASUS board and vice versa. As you can see, there´s only one PCI-E x1 slot that fits between neighbouring PCI Express slots which means graphics cards are located closer to each other now requiring shorter bridge.
On the same photo you can see PCI-E switch socket that manages 16 channels between PCI Express Slot 0 and Slot 1. The switch is operated by manual 180° rotation (ASUSTeK calls its switch EZ Selector).
The expo brought other company´s products on NVIDIA´s 4th generation of chipsets: GA-K8NSP-9 (nForce 4 Ultra) and GA-K8NF-9 (nForce 4) boards will go on sale late in November or early in December.
Source: ASCII24
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