CeBIT 2002 Part 2 - CPUs, Cooling, Motherboards, & Video

Gigabyte

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Certainly the most interesting thing at Gigabyte's booth was this motherboard with ATI's Radeon IGP chipset. This board uses a VIA southbridge since ATI's IXP (South Bridge) won't be ready until several weeks after the chipset debuts.

Gigabyte also has plans for an nForce board, but does not offer one at the moment, because their "relation with NVIDIA is not so good at the moment". This sounds very credible - since Gigabyte were among the very first to switch to ATI chips for their line of graphics cards.

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Gigabyte's dual Athlon board. Unlike its competitors from ASUS, ABIT and MSI, this board has an additional IDE controller from Promise and supports up to eight IDE drives. But just like Gigabyte's other Athlon boards, it cannot read the CPU's internal temperature sensor; thermal monitoring is done only using NTCs in the CPU Socket. One of Gigabyte representatives suggested that this was because of "patent issues" - we asked AMD about this, and the answer was that there aren't any patent issues related to the CPU temperature monitoring.

The board gets its power through the ATX12V P4-style connector.

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The P4 Titan 533 with SIS chipset, which already supports future P4 CPUs with 133MHz FSB.

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Gigabyte's dual Xeon board, with six memory slots.

Gigabyte's High End graphics card, based on the ATI Radeon 8500. It features VGA, DVI, and TV output. Also, note the large heatsink which covers both GPU and RAM. It even has a hole to accommodate one of the capacitors - cute!

Another ATI-based graphics card from Gigabyte. It uses the less expensive Radeon 7500, but also has DVI and TV output.