re: the likes of VIA are going to be SOL if they keep coming out with beta chipsets.
Hi Jim,
Something tells me Via's 15 minutes of fame have expired.
With the SIS 735, nforce and 760 receiving accolades form all corners, their sudden 50% market share may disappear faster than it arrived.
Bad karma, couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys, comes around--goes around, all fit quite nicely.
Here is a nice in depth special on the White box industry from CRN. Seems they're thriving (relatively) while the big boys stumble. Could it be their disproportionate use of athlons? Enjoy.
crn.com
It includes this nice article lauding the quality of the 760 based mobos. Giga's GA7dx takes top prize with the MSI offering trailing the field (badly).
AMD put to the test
By Vincent A Randazzese
crn.com
As more white-box solution providers turn to AMD-based systems in search of better price-performance, they are finding growing support for the chip from leading motherboard manufacturers.
CRN Test Center engineers decided to put four AMD760-chipset motherboards to the test, and discovered that all the vendors offer white-box builders a high-quality upsell opportunity at a competitive price.
The engineers were not surprised by the narrow performance spread between the motherboards in this roundup. With one notable exception, the products tested delivered almost equal performance at comparable costs.
The GA7DX rev 3.0 motherboard from Gigabyte Technology scored the highest. ASUSTeK Com-puter's (ASUS) A7M266 and the AD11 from First International Computer of America (FICA) tied for second place, but each trailed the leader by less than 1 percent, which fell within the test's margin of error. The K7 Master MS-6341 motherboard from Micro-Star International, however, scored 18 percent lower than Gigabyte's GA7DX.
1 Gigabyte's GA7DX motherboard scored highest on seven of 12 applications.
2 The ASUS A7M266 fared best on the memory-intensive Adobe Photoshop 5.5.
3 Micro-Star's K7 Master was slowest, scoring 18 percent lower than its competitors.
4 FICA's AD11 scored 8.4 percent higher than ASUS on
Netscape Communicator.
Each motherboard featured a new communication and networking riser (CNR) card slot, which supports NICs, home-phone networking adapters, modems, USB ports, Bluetooth and audio systems. The CNR offers a low-cost, flexible desktop solution for implementing one of a variety of communications and networking technologies without sacrificing a PCI slot.
All the motherboards had on-board sound systems (sound support built into the chipset), which saves another expansion slot.
Solution providers don't have the option of selling AMD760-chipset motherboards without an audio subsystem, say AMD sources. All currently validated boards have integrated sound, they say.
All systems tested contained a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon processor, an IBM 30-Gbyte ATA100 hard drive, 256 Mbytes of PC 2100 DDR RAM, an nVidia GeForce2 graphics card and an AMD PCnet Family Ethernet Adapter. Only the motherboard varied among systems. To prepare machines for benchmarking, engineers set the video resolution to 1,024 x 768 pixels in true-color mode.
To measure system performance, Test Center engineers ran BAPCo SYSmark 2000, a test suite that measures how fast computers run real-world applications. The benchmark rates system performance with the most popular and progressive business applications, assigning empirical scores based on how quickly a PC runs each application. It also calculates an overall empirical score once all the tests are complete. A higher score indicates better performance, but there is no perfect score.
Gigabyte's motherboard was the fastest unit, with an overall score of 235. The GA7DX scored highest on seven of the 12 applications in the SYSmark suite. It shone the brightest in three out of the four memory-intensive applications: Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1 and Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 4.0. As for the fourth memory-intensive application, Adobe Photoshop 5.5, ASUS fared the best, beating out Gigabyte's and FICA's units by 4 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
The slowest motherboard by far was Micro-Star's K7 Master. Its overall benchmark scores were 17 percent to 18 percent lower than those of its competitors. Significant drop-offs were seen in all applications, regardless of memory use. In CorelDraw 9 and Avid Technology's Elastic Reality 3.1, for example, the K7 Master scored 29.1 percent and 26.7 percent lower than the Gigabyte, respectively.
Test Center engineers were surprised at how closely the FICA and ASUS products scored. Both scored 233 overall, and they had identical Premiere 5.1 and Microsoft Word 2000 scores. For most of the other applications, the performance differences were small enough to fall within the test's margin of error. The biggest discrepancy was in the performance scores for Netscape Communicator, in which FICA's motherboard outperformed ASUS' by 8.4 percent.
Test Center engineers examined each motherboard for construction quality and found them to be well-made overall. They also noted the convenient location of the jumper pin settings, how easily the processors were mounted, BIOS manageability, accessibility to memory slots and cable routing. The motherboards were roomy enough for easy service and came equipped with plenty of expansion slots,five PCI slots, one CNR slot and an AGP graphics slot to support a total of seven expansion cards.
All the motherboards carried street prices of $160 to $170, except ASUS', which costs approximately $180.
It was almost too close to call the motherboard winner, but Gigabyte's GA7DX was the overall best. All the products worked well, and because of their flexibility and functionality, traditional solution providers can use them with confidence. |
