ABIT & AMD

ABIT

ABIT had its current lineup of desktop motherboards on display at Comdex. This includes its new line of uGuru motherboards, the 865PE-based AI7, the AN7, which is the follow-up to the NF7-S and is based on NVIDIA’s nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, and finally, for the Athlon 64 crowd, the KV8-MAX3, which is based on VIA’s K8T800 chipset. All of these motherboards are currently shipping so I decided not to take any pictures of those boards. Also on display in the ABIT booth was its DigiDice small form-factor PC chassis and their line of server motherboards, a market they’ve entered just recently.

What did catch my attention was ABIT’s GeForce FX 5950 Ultra card, the FX5950 Ultra OTES. That’s right, ABIT will be producing a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra card and it will utilize their OTES heat pipe cooling technology. When NVIDIA launched the NV35 core earlier this year, ABIT skipped over the 5900 Ultra, focusing instead on the regular GeForce FX 5900 128MB, so I was a little surprised to see them tackle the high-end. ABIT hopes to have samples of this card before the end of this year. I took a picture, but it didn’t come out well, but the board looks identical to their current 5900 OTES – there’s no new cooling setup here. This isn’t a huge shock though, as the 5950 Ultra only operates 75MHz faster than ABIT’s current 5900 card.

ABIT Siluro FX5700 Ultra card

In addition to the 5950 OTES, ABIT will also be launching the Siluro FX5700 Ultra. This card will be based on NVIDIA’s reference design, right down to the same cooling unit. ABIT just slaps their sticker on the fan, boxes it up, and sells it to the end user. There’s no fancy game bundle included in the packaging, although you do get the obligatory cables and DVD software. At this time, ABIT has no plans to offer an OTES version of the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra.

AMD

After years of displaying prototype Athlon 64/Opteron hardware, Comdex 2003 finally showcased final, retail products based on the technology. AMD had a wall of motherboards on display as well as several notebooks and desktop/server/workstation systems.

0.09-micron Opteron serving HD content

The Opteron setup was serving HD content to this machine

Ferrari Athlon XP notebook

Probably the biggest attention-getter was the 0.09-micron Opteron setup AMD had on display. This prototype system was delivering high definition content to an Alienware Athlon 64 FX-51 system that was running next to it. The clock speed of the system was not revealed.

Voodoo PC laptop

Alienware Athlon 64 notebook

Alienware notebook with case opened

Also on display was a pretty snazzy Athlon XP-based Ferrari notebook as well as Athlon 64 laptops from Alienware and VoodooPC.