CeBIT 2008: Expo stands of Foxconn, Elitegroup, Arctic Cooling
Elitegroup's expo stand
Judging by CeBIT 2008, ECS has abandoned the idea to join the premium sector of motherboards. At the expo stand, there were merely two high-end motherboards based on Intel X48 and X38 chipsets, as well as one on P45. The remaining produce is various MicroATX boards based on cheap chipsets. The attempt to join the sector of expensive motherboards made by the company a couple of years ago has failed: expensive motherboards of the Extreme series were almost precise replicas of regular motherboards with improved cooling system and rich package bundle. But the major consumers of high-end produce, i.e. computer enthusiasts, need either a popular name or excellent overclocking results (it's just this sector where Foxconn is acting through enticing all the skilled engineers in this field).
So, ECS has presented one motherboard based on Intel X48 named X48T-A,
and one one X38 made in the BTX form factor (X38T-GB model)
and P45T-A based on the P45+ICH10 combination.
All the three boards offer specifications which fully meet the chipsets' capabilities without any additional technologies. We note the cooling system for X48T-A which is made up of three copper radiators (many eminent manufacturers prefer fitting painted aluminum radiators) interlinked with heat pipes.
In the value sector, there are no more novelties. These are MicroATX boards based on G45 (the G45T-M with the integrated video core Intel GMA X4500),
and G43 (the model G43T-M with a somehow cut-down video core).
Despite the external similarity, the board based on G45 offers support for the hardware decoding of H.264/VC1/AVC and is quite a good solution for a home-based multimedia system.
Another motherboard is based on the Intel Q45 chipset (the motherboard Q45T-M), with the chip ICH10DO acting as the south bridge.
This motherboard is aimed at corporate users and at least offers support for Proactive Alerting - a notification of software and hardware issues in the remote system, Nonvolatile Storage - storage of special information on hardware resources and software installed in the motherboard's flash memory (which is accessible to the system administrator), Tamper-Resistant Agent - control over the software versions (some sort of user rights restrictions).
At the expo stand, there were also a few more motherboards based on the rather "aged" chipsets G31/G33 and G35, and we are not dwelling on them.
It is much more interesting to look at novelties for the AMD platform. In particular, A780GM-A1 is based on the AMD 780G chipset and is equipped with the south bridge SB700.
The board should not cost much, but if the user want to get even more saving, it is possible to take the MicroATX board A780GM-M (despite the similar names, these two boards use a different PCB design):
But if the struggle is going on for every penny saved, you can take a look at the motherboard A770M-A based on the combination of AMD770 and the outdated (but very cheap) south bridge SB600.
At the expo stand, there were also motherboards based on NVIDIA chipsets. And these are not based on top-end SLI versions but on the cheap integrated GeForce 8200 chipset (by the way, made up of a single chip). This is the ATX motherboard GF8200A:
and the MicroATX board GF8200M-M3:
Apart from the motherboard, we found quite a formidable assortment of ECS video cards. Part of them had a standard cooling system like, for example, this card based on the GeForce 9600GT chip.
Another part of the cards was equipped with a massive cooler which could not be looked through because of the glued strip of paper:
GeForce 9600GT
GeForce 8800GT
However, we quite quickly found out the manufacturer of these cooling devices: it was Arctic Cooling (see the review of the next stand).
In conclusion, we bring in a photo of the new design of boxes for Elitegroup video cards:
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