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Interview with ABIT's Scott Thirwell

Join the community - in the OCAU Forums! Date  23rd October 2002 Author  Chainbolt Manufacturer  ABIT Computer Corp. Upcoming Products, With Pictures! OCAU: Which interesting new products are in the ABIT pipeline? ST: This would be our upcoming dual channel boards for AMD and Intel systems: the NV78X with the nForce 2 chipset and the GB7 with Intel’s Granite Bay chipset. Both will be available within the next 8 weeks. OCAU: How about features and prices? ST: The GB7 will be part of our MAX product line and will be similar to the IT7 Max2: 4-channel RAID with 2 SATA and 2 PATA ports, 6-channel sound, LAN, USB 2.0., Firewire, AGP 8X. Intel’s Granite Bay chipset cost us almost double as much as an 845 chipset, and the GB7 will be probably more expensive than the IT7. The NV7-8X will come in 2 versions: with graphic core and without. Both versions will have USB 2.0, LAN and 6-channel sound, but no RAID. The version without the graphic core will have additionally Firewire and SATA. OCAU: Anything else new at the ABIT booth? ST: I mentioned already our Xeon server board based on the Intel 7500 chipset, the SI-SP+. LAN, Ultra 160 SCSI and ATI Rage XL are integrated. The board works with up to 12 GB ECC DDR memory. Another innovative product we are displaying here for the first time is our new Media XP WLAN. We regard WLAN as a better solution than Bluetooth because of the much longer range. With the WLAN Media XP box connected to any of our MAX boards you are mobile all over even a very big house. OCAU: You recently launched the O.T.E.S cooling system for your GF4 TI4200/4400 Siluro video cards. Will the NV30 also come with O.T.E.S? ST: No comment!    OCAU: What is coming after the NV78X and GB7? ST: For AMD K8 we will have the VIA chipset based K8V and the nVidia based K8N, both with AGP 8X and integrated SATA. For the Pentium 4 the next big event will be our Springdale chipset based IS7 with Gigabit LAN, DDR 333 support, AGP8X and SATA. All these boards are due in Q2 2003. OCAU: How is ABIT thinking about RDRAM? Is this technology “dead”? ST: The market will decide about this, not we. And as you know our TH7-II is still regarded as a reference board for RDRAM solution. OCAU: Sure, but many users are wondering why you didn’t upgrade the TH7-II with the 850E chipset and why Abit doesn’t have a 32-bit RDRAM platform. ST: We are working on a 32-bit RDRAM board. We will not use the 850E chipset but the upcoming 658/963 chipset from SiS. The codename is “SI7”. But it’s not decided yet. OCAU: hmmm, it looks ABIT is quite busy. ST: Your observation is correct! OCAU: One last question. Apparently a few Australian retailers recently stopped selling ABIT boards. Some OCAU members fear that ABIT might give up Australia. ST: Not at all! Australia is naturally not the biggest market for us, but we have stable sales over there, and we absolutely will not leave Australia. OCAU: That’s good to hear! Thank you very much for your time! Readers might also be interested in these two roadmap images from the ABIT booth:    << Back OCAU Main Page Select Page Page 1 - Page 2 -

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