Welcome to Day 2 of our Cebit 2005 coverage with reports from ASUS, ASRock, DFI and MSI.
Day 1 can be found here.

Sorry that the report is going up that late, but there were some good reasons why it got delayed.
Probably the most important to you is, that we attended a few parties.
For example ATI's 20 year party on Tuesday - yes we got some R520 and ATI SLI info.
To protect our source, the information will be posted in Day 4 report, where no ATI manufacturers are covered

ASUS

First trip of the day was to the ASUS booth where some really innovative things where displayed.

Remember last week, when we reported about the Socket 479 to 478 Adapter for the Pentium 4 M processor? Here is more information.

As you can see in the third picture, the CPU socket lever of the motherboard remains accessible with the adapter installed. This allows the adapter to safely attach to the motherboard. It will be available worldwide, starting next month, for a price of around $30.

Obviously the compatibility list will only list ASUS motherboards, but I was told that it should work on other motherboards as well. However, a competitor told me that the adapter is not working that smooth yet: "it only works really good on one ASUS motherboard which is being phased out". I would say let's give ASUS a bit of time to fine-tune it and we will see in one month.

Motherboards

The A8N-SLI and A8N-SLI Premium are based on NVIDIA's nForce4 SLI chipset and bring the following features:

• Support for AMD Socket 939
• HT 2000 MHz
• Memory support for Dual Channel DDR400
• 2x PCI-E x16, 2x PCI-E x1, 3x PCI
• 4x SATA II RAID
• Additional 4x SATA RAID (on A8N-SLI Premium only)
• Pericom PCI-E switch which allows changing from single to dual card configuration via software (A8N-SLI Premium only)
• Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE1394a
• 7.1 Channel Audio

The P5ND2-SLI Deluxe is ASUS' new board using NVIDIA's new nForce4 for Intel chipset.

• Support for Pentium 4 LGA775
• FSB 1066 MHz
• Dual Channel DDR2 667 support
• 2x PCI-E x16, 2x PCI-E x1, 3x PCI
• 4x SATA II RAID, 4x SATA RAID
• Gigabit Ethernet, IEEE1394a
• 7.1 Channel Audio

When asked, ASUS says NVIDIA's chipset can well compete with Intel's solution in both stability and performance.


The P5WD2 Deluxe and P5WD2 Premium are both based on Intel's brand new i955X chipset.

• Support for Pentium4 LGA Socket 775
• FSB 1066 MHz
• Dual Channel DDR2 667 support, up to 8 GB
• 1x PCI-E x16, 3x PCI-E x1, 3x PCI
• 4x SATA II RAID
• Gigabit Ethernet
• High Definition Audio
• IEEE1394 (on the P5WD2 Premium) - this is the only difference between both boards

The P5RD1-V Deluxe uses ATI's brand new Radeon XPRESS 200 chipset for Intel and the ULI M1573 southbridge, because ATI's southbridge is still not working that well yet. "It [ATI's SB] does only half of what it is supposed to do".

• Support for Intel Pentium 4 LGA Socket 774
• 800 MHz FSB
• 1x PCI-E x16, 3x PCI-E x1, 3x PCI
• Dual Channel DDR 400 support
• Integrated ATI VGA
• 4x SATA RAID
• Gigabit Ethernet
• IEEE1394a, High-definition Audio
• On-board TV Tuner

Using Intel's i915PL and ICH6, the P5GPL offers:

• Support for Intel Pentium 4 LGA775
• FSB 800 MHz
• 1x PCI-E x16, 3x PCI-E x1, 3x PCI
• Dual Channel DDR400 support
• Gigabit Ethernet
• High Definition Audio

What I like about this board is that the PCI-E x1 connectors are located in a way that you can still use them when a video card with a two slot cooler is installed.

Video Cards

We already reported about this monster video card in the daily news.
This dual 6800U with 512 MB memory (256 MB per GPU) will only be sold in the US and Asia and is going to retail for $1500+ bundled with an ASUS motherboard only. Also total production will be around 4000 units. We asked about the board size and ASUS confirmed that this is the final PCB size, as well as the final cooling.
Quad-SLI using two of these boards is not possible at this time and depends on whether NVIDIA can/will add support for it to their drivers.
A 512 MB single GPU 6800U design is planned from ASUS but nor pictures or details were revealed.


This nice little dual 6600 will initially be sold only in Asia. If the demand is there, ASUS will consider selling it in Europe and the US, too. Compared to Gigabyte's solution it is "more stable and has better memory", but the price will be a bit higher as well.


For ATI's side of things there was not really much new to see at ASUS. The X850 series will get a new cooler, most probably a 1-slot design - the image is still of the standard ATI cooler.