Abit QuadGT is almost ready for prime-time.......

See:-

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2934

Final words:-
"Call it blind faith, or maybe we are just gluttons for beta BIOS
testing, but we believe this board will be worth all the trouble
shortly"

Got your board yet, Richard ? You were expecting it to arrive by the
end of January. Did I miss your report ?

John Lewis

 

Been too busy messing with the board to bother with the resident anti-fanboi
I guess John, but seeing as you're obviously desperate to buy one, I'll
throw you a boner.

Annoyingly, before my board turned up, Abit inconveniently fixed the issue
in uGuru which resulted in the vDIMM error, so I have been unable to turn
any memory into roman candles.

I've also been unable to find any stability issues, and even more
annoyingly, I was able to get Windows installed straight away, thanks to
previous experience gained with JMB363 equipped boards. I also had the beta
2 BIOS the day the board arrived, and got b6 the day it was released, so the
only major teething issue the board had in my eyes (the incompatibility
between the JMB363 and the ICH8-R) was fixed by Abit within days. I've since
constructed my own customised BIOS that incorporates fully working EIST/CxE
and further optimised settings, so all in all I'm more than happy with it at
this point.

The design of the board is very nice, it has all the features I need, it's
an absolute screaming overclocker, and I've also been able to contribute in
a small way to developing it and helping other owners out over the last
couple of weeks. I've also got some ideas for customising it further and ,
so generally I've got that nice warm satisfied glow. Anything else?
--


Richard Hopkins
Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
(replace nospam with pipex in reply address)

 

My issue with *all* modern boards is lack of usable PCI slots, and this one
is no exception. Let's say I want to go SLI. That leaves *one* usable PCI
slot. I need at least two, for a Soundbaster X-Fi and a PhysX card. Add in a
KillerNIC maybe, and I need *three* slots. Hardly any board has that and
none have all three accessible with SLI.

 

PhysX is dead-duck. Both dual/quad-core and GPU-accelerators such as
the 8800-family more than satisfy the physics-algorithm processing
and will be main-stream supported by gaming developers. Havok, for
example is working closely with nVidia and ATi and the major
game-developers on accelerating physics using GPU and multicore CPU
horsepower. Also, Ageia throttled themselves anyway by not creating
the PhysX card in a PCIe form. Fighting for bandwidth on the shared
PCI bus was a totally stupid implementation. PCIeX1 in duplex mode has
4x the effective bandwidth of PCI.

Also, you can throw away your PCI X-Fi if Vista gets to dominate.
Incompatible with Vista's audio stack. Creative's day in the sun with
a hammer-lock on PC audio peripherals is over. Audio processing
implementations on motherboards with noise-free quality via a TOS-link
to an external receiver/decoder. Er, where is Creative's PCIe version
of the X-Fi ? A 4-inch long card would easily fit the millions of
empty PCIe X1 or X4 short-slots. Obviously Creative have seen the
writing on the wall.

KillerNIC ?

Upcoming high-end motherboards will be implementing integrated 10Gbit
network interfaces. Killer enough for you? Many current mainstream
motherboards now implement integrated dual 1GBit NIC interfaces.

The days of PCI serving the mainstream are over. Legacy PCI will
indeed persist for a while. There are still quite a few
special-function PCI cards out on the market, especially in the
signal-processing and video-processing area of technology.

But all the mainstream PC functionality previously associated with
plug-in PCI cards are now integrated into modern motherboards.

John Lewis