Feature Articles

Heart of the PC - 10 Years of Motherboards

By Vincent Chang - 3 Jan 2009

Timeline: 1999

1999

  • While one of the most important processors, AMD's Athlon would be introduced to the world in June 1999, Intel was still top dog when 1999 dawned. The chip giant would soon launch the Pentium III, with SSE and along with this, a new generation of chipsets was to follow, including the i810 chipset that came with integrated graphics and more significantly from a historical perspective, we saw the first definition of a Memory Controller Hub (MCH), I/O Controller Hub (ICH) on a chipset. And yes, this is a chipset for the low-end.

An early i810 board that we looked at, the DFI PW65-D.

  • While the functions of these 'hubs' were not so much different from its former names of North and Southbridge chips, the use of this new terminology would soon be a part of Intel's official nomenclature and frankly, these names were definitely more descriptive than 'North and Southbridge' chips. The i810 chipset also saw the appearance of the Audio Modem Riser (AMR) which 'gives Audio and Modem functionality on the cheap.' This provided integrated audio and modem functionality and removed the need for a full fledged add-on card, appropriate for the i810's target audience of "system-integrators, office PCs and low to medium-home usage (not for hard-core 3D gamers)." However, the AMR and its successive counterparts like ACR and other variants never really caught on and was silently discontinued in a couple of years.
  • Intel was to follow the i810 with the widely anticipated i820, 'Camino' chipset, which brought some significant technical improvements, including the use of RAMBUS' RDRAM memory. Despite providing better bandwidth on paper, RDRAM would prove to be a failure, due to its high cost and latencies, making it unappealing to consumers. The i820 also saw the increase of the AGP standard to 4x and ATA66 doubled the bandwidth of ATA33.

AMD's K7 showing the Pentium III that there's a new kid on the block in our test of the AMD-751 board from MSI, the 6167.

As a new chipset, the i820 found the going tough against the popular 440BX, no doubt due to the limited and dubious benefits of going the RAMBUS way. We had the same conclusions while testing the ASUS P3C-S, which managed to support both SDRAM and RDRAM through a riser converter. Unfortunately, "in all the three benchmarks, we do see a lot of difference when we use RDRAM instead of SDRAM. I guess RAMBUS does live up to its name, but, the gain in performance is not a lot, and not enough to justify its cost."

Intel was to make a U-turn in the next few years but this decision, together with the recent release of a certain K7 micro-architecture would tilt the scales towards AMD.

AMD's K7 showing the Pentium III that there's a new kid on the block in our test of the AMD-751 board from MSI, the 6167.

We got a glimpse of the potential of the K7 with our testing of the MSI MS-6167, which was a typical AMD-751 board that ran stable and fine. The scores meanwhile, were impressive against the Pentium III, even though this board came with only 2x AGP and even then its AGP was also prone to incompatibility issues. "Overall, the MS-6167 is one of the most stable boards I've ever tested. Its performance is pretty good considering how infant the Athlon and its chipsets were."

Amidst all the excitement generated by the K7, there was a certain motherboard vendor which introduced a new feature on its 440BX board that would become a standard for the company and inspire others to follow. This was the Gigabyte BX2000, which was the first appearance of Gigabyte's DualBIOS feature. As you may know by now, this feature saw the implementation of two Flash BIOS chip onboard, with one acting as the backup in cases where the BIOS got corrupted due to viruses or a bad BIOS update.

Our opinion then was that "The new Dual-Bios feature will really be treasured by important office-PCs with little down-time to spare as well as end-users like us who aren't keen in overclocking but would like to spend on safety and reliability of their system." And thus far, this has been true and Gigabyte would tout this advantage for years to come.

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