Rushed Motherboard Debuts Plague AMD's Bid for Mainstream Buyers
"While helpful AMD supporters are offering online advice on everything from BIOS flashes and physical replacements to requesting new motherboards, some of these previously eager AMD customers have likely already traded their new PCs for Pentium 4 systems. "
hardware.earthweb.com
Weekly Platform Trends: The Race That Launched a Thousand Chips
By Vince Freeman
Rushed Motherboard Debuts Plague AMD's Bid for Mainstream Buyers
Okay, maybe "a thousand chips" is an exaggeration, but the recent launch of the VIA KT266A chipset was one of the biggest product releases of the year. You see, the KT266A is the new revision of VIA Technologies' flagship AMD Socket A chipset, and prerelease performance numbers had it well in the lead over competing products. Add in the complimentary debut of AMD's Athlon XP and the chipset's very low price point (especially compared to other new entries like Nvidia's nForce), and the demand for KT266A motherboards quickly reached a fever pitch.
From my own testing, the KT266A is indeed a very powerful chipset and seems ideally suited for the Athlon XP. The KT266A's internal timings are greatly improved over the original, and as VIA likes to state in its press releases, it's the company's first chipset to feature "Performance Driven Design." Although I'm not sure what that implies for VIA's previous products, it doesn't seem to be pure marketing hype -- as has been proven in benchmark tests against currently available chipsets from the likes of ALi, SiS and AMD itself (although the nForce is a bit of a dark horse), VIA has made some notable architectural improvements instead of just taking its KT266 and slapping an A on it.
Unfortunately, the positive press the KT266A has been getting, along with marketing pressure to be first to market with a new Athlon XP motherboard, seems to have caused some companies to jump the gun a bit. The firms first out of the gate with KT266A motherboards were an odd bunch, with entrants like Shuttle and EPoX joining perennial early arriver MSI.
Both Gigabyte and ASUS weighed in a bit later (as did others such as ECS), but for a period of time, MSI, Shuttle, and EPoX were about the only KT266A motherboards available -- with results that forced many buyers to reconsider their need to live on the cutting edge of technology.
Three of a Kind
Let's start with MSI. The first edition of its K7T266 Pro2 was a mistake caused by haste, pure and simple. There were issues present that should have easily been caught in beta testing; problems when trying to use the third DIMM socket or enabling BIOS hardware monitoring resulted in much lower performance and potential compatibility issues with new Athlon XP processors.
Thankfully, these seem to have been addressed in BIOS revision 3.2 and motherboard revision 2.0C. That's great, but doesn't change the fact that the K7T266 Pro2 was a very important release for MSI, as the company got quite a black eye over its initial KT266 board and probably hoped to recover with a strong effort this time out.
The Shuttle AK31 board is a very interesting product, in that it offers the performance of VIA's KT266A at an incredibly low price point. Just as with MSI, however, racing to market has caused Shuttle some growing pains. The initial run of boards had issues with select power supplies and certain types of DDR memory, and even featured the popular "no POST at 133MHz" problem when increasing the system bus speed from the default 100MHz. Once again, the latest (3.1) revision of the AK31, along with an updated BIOS file, seems to have cleared up the majority of problems.
The last KT266A motherboard I'll discuss is the EPoX 8KHA+ -- and while this board came closest to smelling like a rose, it was still not immune to weeds. The hardware seems to be rock solid, as the initial retail 2.0 revision is listed as Athlon XP 1900+ compatible and the current BIOS is running great. The problems EPoX encountered related more to not taking sufficient time in the production and part-allocation process: Even though the 8KHA+ is probably the most polished of the early KT266A crop, the initial run of boards had some serious problems relating to the BIOS chips themselves.
Some boards shipped with write-protected chips, while the earliest BIOSes had a serious "reboot, then freeze" problem. EPoX deserves some credit for reacting quickly and openly and curing the glitch with its N+ (or newer) BIOS chip revisions.
Of course motherboard and BIOS revisions are not a new aspect of computing, but frankly, the situation with KT266A boards is in a whole different league. Never before have I seen such a round of rapid product revisions or so many issues with something as simple as putting the right BIOS chip into a retail product.
It's quite obvious that these snafus resulted from the overriding desires to be first to market and to ride on the back of the Athlon XP release. This becomes even more apparent when you realize that the Athlon XP is really not an upgrade chip; it basically requires a new platform to realize its full performance capabilities and provide rock-solid stability. After extensive testing of the Athlon XP 1900+ on fully XP-compatible AMD 761 DDR and KT133A SDRAM platforms, the marked improvement in my new EPoX 8KHA+ reference system makes this abundantly clear.
The initial crop of KT266A boards represents a very bad trend for hardware releases. Sadly enough, it seems to mimic much of the software we see on shelves today -- release it fast, then patch it later. The only problem is that if you make a mistake with the basic hardware that a quick BIOS flash won't fix, patching is really not an option. Hence, the myriad product revisions we're seeing (and will continue to see) create serious issues not only for consumers, but for the companies involved as well.
Grandma Balks at Changing Her BIOS
This trend translates into buyer distrust and confusion, as consumers either don't know which motherboard to buy for their new Athlon XP systems, or do have the relevant information but have trouble finding it at the point of sale. Looking through the Usenet newsgroups, I see a high level of traffic devoted to finding online retailers or system vendors who have the newest revisions (almost like a mini "find the Xbox" scenario). I myself was forced to wade through box after box of incompatible or bug-ridden products before finding my Holy Grail with an EPoX 8KHA+ 2.0 with N+ BIOS. I'm afraid many unknowing consumers are even now buying new Athlon XP systems with older, less stable foundations.
Premature motherboard manufacturers are not only taking big risks with consumers, but inviting problems at the retail and OEM levels as well. In fact, in my never-ending search for a stable KT266A platform, I found many resellers advertising various KT266A boards who don't actually stock those brands anymore. Quite a few of them had even gone so far as to move to an "ASUS only" business model.
The reasons were simple: Not only do these local stores have to deal with the motherboard during installation and testing, but they must support the product long after. A flaky motherboard design or revision costs these outlets serious time and money -- and with the incredibly small margins of retail PC sales, mistakes are costly.
The company I feel most for in this debacle is AMD. Its processors are already under incredible scrutiny, and every crash or problem only makes system buyers more uncomfortable. This, too, is a big topic in online discussions, as numerous shoppers wooed by the speed and economy of the Athlon XP are hastily returning their KT266A systems due to stability or compatibility problems. The cry, "back to Intel," is resonating deeply among these early adopters, and that's highly unfortunate.
While helpful AMD supporters are offering online advice on everything from BIOS flashes and physical replacements to requesting new motherboards, some of these previously eager AMD customers have likely already traded their new PCs for Pentium 4 systems. Face it: Most consumers aren't comfortable having to flash a BIOS, any more than they're comfortable compiling their own Linux kernels. With the right platform, the Athlon XP is a very impressive piece of hardware, but the difference between some of the early attempts and my current EPoX configuration is startling.
Maybe the only answer is for consumers to wait for the dust to settle, and stop rushing to buy new components the minute they're available. Or perhaps we can hope that the fallout from the KT266A race has taught vendors a lasting lesson. If not, withholding revenues and pointing out product flaws is certainly tough love, but it may be the only message these companies will hear.
November 16, 2001 |
