Motherboards in 2001 Preview: Part 1

Firewire, 6-channel audio and dual sockets from ABIT

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The board above is the SA6R-1394.  It is an enhanced version of the ABIT SA6R, which supports Socket-370 Intel processors and features SoftMenu III and the famous Highpoint HPT370 ATA 100 RAID controller.  From the name, it is obvious that ABIT has integrated support for IEEE 1394 Firewire.  They’ve used a Texas Instruments chipset that is quite common among Firewire solutions, making this motherboard a bit more server-ready.  Unfortunately, the i815 is not particularly well suited to a server environment where its 512MB memory limit would be a severe problem. On the flip side, Firewire is becoming increasingly popular for home users as digital video camera with Firewire interfaces gain popularity, so an i815 board with such support is not a bad idea at all.

We were not able to get confirmation, but it seems that this Firewire solution is a single chip one.  In the past, Firewire has generally been implemented with a two-chip solution, which takes up more PCB space and increases the cost by a fair amount - something motherboard manufacturers have pointed to as limiting the adoption of integrated Firewire.  If ABIT can implement a one-chip solution, that should help to reduce the price of this motherboard. Don’t be surprised to see it show up on more boards as time goes on.

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To a great extent, on-board audio has been ignored by most hardware enthusiasts, but simultaneously embraced by OEM’s looking to cut costs.  For many end users, these CODEC’s are far from satisfactory, so they end up getting a dedicated PCI sound card.  But the ABIT SV6, shown above, uses 3 on-board CODEC’s to provide 6-channel audio.  More than likely, this will again be something that OEM’s love and hardware enthusiasts hate.  It will be something that OEM’s can advertise on their list of features, while those choosing to use a hardware-based PCI sound card will have to pay for it even if they don’t use it.  This Socket-370 motherboard, the SV6, also features the Highpoint HPT370 ATA 100 RAID controller.

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The ABIT VP6 is shown above. Think of it as the replacement for the extremely popular BP6, which was the first dual Socket-370 board on the market back when Celeron’s were the only Socket-370 processors. With the VP6,  the i440BX is replaced by the VIA Apollo Pro 133A and the Highpoint HPT366 by the HPT370. That means we get official 133MHz FSB, FC-PGA CPU support, AGP 4X, and ATA 100 RAID.