Computex 2003 - Day 4: XGI, Motherboards, and cheap Itaniums

Jetway

Jetway had quite a bit to show off at Computex this year, including their own line of NVIDIA video cards, desktop motherboards, SFFs, and LCDs.

The box pictured above is Jetway’s Pentium 4-based SFF. We absolutely love the front panel design; a sleek LCD panel displays AM/FM radio stations, and anything else loaded in either of the optical drives. Then there’s the cool silver color lining that makes this SFF stand out more than any other we saw at Computex this year. The nicest addition is front panel serial ports such as USB 2.0, IEEE 1394 FireWire, and SPDIF. This is quite an SFF we look forward to reviewing in the near future.

The picture listed just above us is yet another Jetway SFF, this time based on the Athlon 64 3200+ processor. The USB/FireWire front panel serial ports and choice of CPU make this a very powerful SFF.

Jetway’s SFFs are definitely much more attractive than most we’ve seen at Computex this year, save for Shuttle. We commend them on a job well done.

The motherboard above is Jetway’s SiS 755 Athlon 64 motherboard. This Hammer board is based on the single channel DDR 754-pin Athlon 64 processor and will include SiS’ 964 with native Serial ATA when it ramps up production next month.

Jetway also had their nForce3 motherboard on display, the N3KA. This board is based on the nForce3 150 chipset and is of the Socket 754 variety. Around this time, we learned from a manufacturer close to NVIDIA that the graphics firm was attempting to ship their new South Bridge, MCP-S1000, next month. The “S” in MCP-S1000 stands for native Serial ATA support, and the “1000” stands for 10/100/1000 GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) support. nForce3 chips with these two new technologies are expected to hit the market in November.