Building a box in Q1 2004
With the roadmap contents regurgitated for everyone's Q1 offerings, what are your choices for building a box or upgrading, for each of the enthusiast platforms?Socket A
Socket A first and Athlon XP processors. KT890 is all that's new from the companies that I've looked at and it remains to be seen if it can knock nForce2 Ultra 400 from its perch. The VT8251 bridge would make any possible boards attractive, even if they ignore the PCI Express 1x lanes for peripheral expansion.If performance is strong and someone like ASUS or ABIT produce a fine board using KT890 and VT8251, it will be well worth a look. nForce2 Ultra 400 relies a lot on extra ASICs for added features, but board makers can still keep the cost under £100 most of the time. That makes it hard for VIA based boards to compete on cost, but there could be a surprise board from someone. Here's hoping, I'm sure the inevitable reference board will be great.
If you're an enthusiast though, you'll probably be looking elsewhere in Q1, to Athlon 64 and Pentium 4, unless you're on a budget.
Socket 754/939
Socket 939 won't appear until late Q1, so it leaves updates to current boards like ASUS K8V and ABIT KV8-MAX3, with VIA's forthcoming K8T800 Pro chipset and possibly the VT8251 bridge, that'll keep the platform ticking over until Socket 939 and CPUs for it.Q1 should be the part of 2004 where the platform completely takes off in the eyes of the enthusiast, Model 3000+ and updated boards will see to that. Q2 sees PCI Express for graphics and DDR-II, so if you already have a piece of the Athlon 64 CPU pie, you might want to wait until then.
For everyone else, look out for brilliant new motherboards soon, along with new CPUs later in the quarter. This platform is where the performance party is at, don't expect that to change as Q1 progresses. That's despite new offerings from the mighty Intel.
Socket 478
The motherboards for Socket 478 in Q1 will be largely unchanged, save a tweaked product here and there. With the upcoming socket nonsense in April, it's the CPU that's doing all the moving and shaking in Q1.Prescott debuts in a couple of days, it remains to be seen how it'll perform across the board, although I think everyone has an idea of the general gist. It has price in its favour, the new CPUs should be cheap enough, so Prescott-supporting Springdale boards should become popular with a lot of people.
Q1 for Intel lovers could be a little stale, as everyone holds off for Grantsdale and Alderwood, or casts an eye over Athlon 64. PT890 might make a few board makers knock something out, but don't look for it to tempt many to solutions based around it.
There's not much to do upgrading wise apart from buying a new processor, people new to the platform have existing boards to choose from at the same time, nothing new is coming for a little while.
