Mobos Add 'Convenience' Features
Harty says he likes to stick with motherboard brands he's comfortable with (though, for competitive reasons, he declined to provide specifics). However, when new features, such as 64 bits or the PCI Express point-to-point interconnect, come to the fore, it makes sense to take a fresh look at all comers. Two motherboard manufacturers that are making big pushes into the emerging 64-bit space are SuperMicro Computer and Tyan Computer. Both have introduced new Xeon boards equipped with support for PCI-E and for DDR2 memory.
Richard Doherty, lead analyst at Envisioneering, Seaford, N.Y., agrees that higher-end graphics are migrating to the motherboard. "Graphics built into Intel chipsets, which are adequate for nearly everyone except extreme gamers, is becoming a standard feature," he says. In that regard, Asustek is among the mobo makers that have focused on folding high-end graphics support into its product line. The company has added a PCI Express graphics link mode to boards based on Intel's 915P and 925X chipsets to raise the throughput of the graphics subsystem.
But one big surprise has been the failure of integral wireless networking to take hold. "Intel's new 915 chip encourages putting 802.11 in the white box," Doherty explains. "That has not seen a fraction of the pickup that Intel expected. Business users don't want to have every cubicle with a Wi-Fi connection—wired is a lot easier to manage and a lot more secure."