| Abit and Vapochill Presentation in Stockholm |
Category : Presentations
Manufacturer :
Posted by: Major on 2001-09-15 00:00:00
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Abit Innovation 2001On Friday, September 14th 2001, OcPrices was attending a presentation in Stockholm, Sweden by Abit, the well-known company that produce motherboards, video cards and more and Asetek, the company that produce the Vapochill line of cooling systems. During this presentation, arranged by Scott Thirlwell, Regional Marketing Manager from Abit, we were shown a few of the products the two companies currently have in production, and given a lot of information of what the next 3-6 months should bring. Also, we were let in on a great 'secret' about the TH7II-Raid. The presentation were attended by all of the bigger sites in Sweden, 64 Bits (who kindly lend me their photos for this article as my own were overexposed), Sweclockers, Nordic Hardware and G-Force X.
Unfortunately we didn't get to actually see that many of their products actually running, as they because of the terrible September 11th terror attack in the US and the following delays of transportation, had most of their hardware stuck in London. We should among other things have seen their upcoming KR7-Raid and Geforce 3 IVO in action. Obviously we would have liked to see the products running as promised, but due to the circumstances everybody understood and accepted this without any questions. And it still proved to be an interesting day without the actual demonstrations..
Click pictures to enlarge.
General information about Abit and Asetek:
Abit's Scott Thirlwell started the presentation and tried to give us an idea of what Abit stands for and what their intentions are. Here are a couple of the main points (remember this is their regional marketing manager speaking - still interesting I think!):
- They are to continue to produce products specifically for overclockers and other power users as this was their where there initial market and support came from, and still continues to be.
- In all Abit's coming motherboards, there will always be a RAID feature on board. Actually they consider this to be standard now, but will also produce non-RAID boards for those who don't need it.
- They will continue to listen to consumers demands, as they for instance did with voltage settings, which are now able to be tweaked to 2.2 v on many of their newer boards.
- Abit will only put out products that are guaranteed to be of very high quality and will provide good performance for overclockers and other users. Abit said that they had a KT266 board running earlier this year, but decided not to put it out as it didn't perform satisfactorily. They lost a lot of the market as they didn't have a DDR board out until this August, but decided that they couldn't afford to put a bad performer on the market. In hindsight, I'll say this was a good decision...
- Also, we were told many stories of Abit's R&D (Research and Development) department. Among them the fact that some of the engineers have boards that support 5V core settings (!!!), that the whole team that initally did their SoftMenu are still there as it is an interesting place to be. Scott Thirlwell said that Abit are still determined on putting boards out that are appealing to overclockers and other power users, and they try and implement the mods their R&D team actually makes on their own machines. Overclocking Strips, a new feature to enhance stability in overclocking, was originally developed by an R&D employee on his own machine to later be implemented in the TH7II-Raid among others.
Current products
TH7II-Raid: This P4 i850 based motherboard has been out for a few weeks and have already gained a great reputation among users and reviewers. This board was being used with the Vapochill system present. What was VERY interesting about this board is that it has a feature called AGP/PCI *fix*. The fix makes it possible to run your FSB above specs WITHOUT having to overclock your PCI or AGP devices. And as always with Abit's boards, this feature is in the BIOS, so need to fiddle with jumpers :)... Somehow this feature has been missed by most reviewers of this board - although it somehow seems to be the most interesting part of this great performer.
The people from Abit present didn't know HOW this feature worked, but promised to let us know as soon as they got back to their Taiwan office. Also, they were not sure whether this feature would be present in all future boards, but I am crossing my fingers 
 |  | | Abit TH7II-Raid | Soft Menu FIX |
BL7-Raid: i845+ SDRAM. Not really a great combination - Pentium 4 and SDRAM - and obviously this board is aimed at very price conscious buyers that are not interested in the greatest performance.
KG7-Raid: the first SocketA motherboard by Abit has proven to be a great board beating most other boards in performance and overclocking features.
So - What does the (immediate or near) future hold:
Geforce 3 IVO: Supposed to be highly overclockable. They have just found a heatsink that reduces heat by almost 30% to get even better results from overclocking. Abit believes this will be the most overclockable Geforce 3 board of all the boards out there. Also as its name might suggest (IVO) the boards has video in/out.
KR7-Raid: (KT266A): this should be out in about a month. As it uses the new KT266A chipset, it should prove to be a great performer.
What are they working on...
nForce: Abit has no time schedule for when a motherboard based on the nForce chipset will be out. They are doing tests on it currently, but have not yet managed to get it to run completely stable. They are now therefore working on solutions to this... Nvidia haven't made motherboard chipsets before so Abit want to test it thoroughly before releasing a board to the public...
i845 with DDR support - on the drawing board - but due to the legal battle between Via and Intel there are no actual time schedule for when a motherboard with this function will be on the market.
Sis735: Abit says they are also looking at this chipset, and says it is looking good. BUT due to the fact that Sis have made so many bad products during the later years, they are a bit vary to use this chipset. But if they get it running well, they may put a motherboard on the market.
Dual AMD motherboards - Abit will have a dual AMD motherboard for the Palomino MP processors out, it may even be out as soon as October! However - this board is NOT aimed at home users but is aimed at server setups. Abit has no current time schedule for releasing one of these boards for home users, but will of course release one as soon as possible.
Vapochill:
The presentation wasn't only about and with Abit. Present was also Asetek that produce the Vapochill line of cooling solutions.
The people from Asetek told a little about how their cooling works, why it is needed and what they are currently working on.
As for how their cooling works, here is a quote from their website:The VapoChill cooling systems utilizes a principle, which has been known for decades and can be explored in every household refrigerator... Check this page out for more details...
The reason for Asetek being there that day (other than presenting their own line of products) was that they were using the TH7II-Raid in their system. Due to the AGP/PCI fix mentioned above, you can overclock (or 'thermically accellerate' as they call it) your CPU and not overclock you AGP or PCI devices at all. As they are now targeting CAD and other companies who are very dependant on CPU power, this is of course amazingly important as they are only interested in totally stable systems.
They showed us some pretty impressive overclocking. When we arrived they had a P4 2.0 GHz running at 2400 (133x18) MHz with the processor running at about 7 degrees C! During their presentation they upped the speed a notch, and got it running at 2520 MHz (140x18), again running very cool (about 10-12 degrees C) and without overclocking the PCI or AGP devices... Nice!
Overall the day was very interesting and it shall be interesting to follow these companies more closely during the near future, as they have some real interesting solutions for us power users.
Again I want to thank 64 Bits for lending me their photos.
Comment about this article in our forums, here.
Abit's Website
Asetek's Website
/\/\ajor
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