First Intel Quad Core Ready Desktop Mobo Spotted

MojoDog writes "Today Universal Abit launched their AW9D and AW9D-MAX motherboards based on the Intel 975X chipset. There has been much anticipation in the industry for this series and as far as looks go, these boards are built to please. One interesting bullet point in the spec list is that these boards are "Quad Core Ready", in line with a possible year-end release of Intel's Quad-Core Kentsfield CPU perhaps? Time will tell!"

Re:Their 965-based AB9 Pro is not very good.

[binarysins]

I'm assuming that you've actually checked the power supply to make sure that it's putting out consistent power, considering how some brands of motherboards are notoriously sensitive to fluctuations.

Why no ECC?

[5pp000]

How can a motherboard have all this stuff and leave out ECC? I would never buy a motherboard without ECC. Don't people want their machines to stay up more than a week at a time???

Re:Why no ECC?

[Gothmolly]

Gamers don't. I don't. My workstation at work doesn't stay up for more than 9 hours or so.

insanity

[bcrowell]

Of course some people are always going to want to have the fastest game machine on the block. But seriously, it's amazing the kind of performance you can get these days with cheap, low-end hardware. Yesterday I built a machine for $300 with a 3 GHz P4 and 1 Gb of ram. (I reused a hard disk, so that cut the price a little.) Sure I could have built a dual-core system, but I would have ended up with a machine that cost many times more, used tons of power, and had almost identical performance except when I had two cpu-intensive processes running at once (i.e., almost never).

Re:Why no ECC?

[DrDitto]

If you live in high altitude areas, ECC RAM is really necessary if you want reliable computing. Even with ECC, higher-end servers will "scrub" memory by periodically reading out every memory block to correct single-bit errors before they become double-bit errors.

The Virginia Apple Supercomputer initially used non-ECC nodes. Couldn't keep the machine up and they ended up selling off all of the original Xserve machines to get ECC Xserve's.

At Los Alamos altitude, the problem is even worse. It isn't uncommon for non-ECC workstations to crash every other day.