New ABit boards in the offing

Following on from our report on ABit's 2001 Roadshow on Wednesday, we've learnt that the company is working on several products that deserve to be acknowledged. The Pentium 4 Socket 478 market will benefit from two DDR motherboards from ABit; the first will be based on i845 from Intel, and will launch in the first quarter of next year, and the second may well be based on VIA's extremely controversial P4X266 chipset, but that's subject to the resolution of legal conflicts between VIA and Intel. If all goes to plan, we could see that in this fourth quarter, however. Of course, we knew about the KR7-RAID, one of the company's very latest boards based on the VIA KT266 chipset. We have no learned that ABit plans to launch a successor, KR7A-RAID in late October, based on the VIA KT266A chipset. On a similar note, the company's nFORCE-based motherboard will apparently be called NV7, and is expected to join us later in the fourth quarter, as we learned over sausages and steak at the Kensington Roof Gardens on Tuesday. As far as Athlon multiprocessing is concerned, ABit are working closely with AMD and claim that their boards will be among the first few consumer boards validated by the chip giant. Related Feature - ABit Roadshow 2001 Report