http://xkcd.com/528/

People applaud battery technology when they reach a milestone like 24 hours on a single charge. HP has recently released their own netbook claiming 24 wonderous hours of battery life. Really battery technology has not changed in the laptop market, what has changed is the hardware that goes along with that battery. I would really like to see longer battery life out of the full size and power laptops that are out there now. Once I see that then I will be more impressed. While I see the usefulness of a netbook I am not surprised at their ability to last 24 hours on a single charge.

This seems like a bold move to basically throw together 2 old northbridge chip sets and market it as a new high end motherboard. It doesn’t even support a Core 2 Duo. While being a Socket 775 motherboard the lack of this critical support puts it at a disadvantage. I don’t even see this as a likely gaming platform. It will be difficult at best to find a CPU that will operate in this motherboard.

The mainboard is comprised of 2 nForce 4 northbridges. The main north bridge is a Intel based which drives 2 of the 4 PCI Express x16 slots, and the ‘slave’ north bridge is an nForce 4 AMD based, and it controls the other 2 PCI Express x16 slots. The 2 north bridges are connected using HyperTransport technology from AMD. If you are running all 4 slots in ‘SLI mode’ they don’t run in full x16 mode. Its the early first generation SLI which the cards ran in 8x mode.

One benefit it does have is the ability to support many displays. Each discrete card can have 2 monitors hooked up. Which with no additional hardware you can run 8 independant displays. This almost seems like a proof of concept to show the world that even with locked down standards there can be some great modifications that allow some innovative results. While I would really like to see this in main stream motherboards, hopefully no more expensive than they are now, with some support from Nvidia or ATI would make some seriously high end systems.