Inside the minds of a motherboard maker

Supplied by Chaintech

Behind the PCB

There are expectations when a consumer purchases a product. What are those
expectations and how are they important to the consumer? In the tech site world
products are reviewed to digitally put them in the consumer’s hands before
the actual purchase is made. The product is tested and features and performance
are explained and compared.

A piece of the puzzle equally important to how a product performs is how the
company that made it performs.

The gospel is preached from inside the silicon walls of tech sites. The rut
has been deeply furrowed into the pattern of benchmarks to determine the winner
of this week’s race. Viciously short product cycles make yesterday’s
heralded advancement a forgotten antique of today. The answer to who or what
is the best is utterly complex with endless combinations of influences. Every
additional demand further broadens the scope of product and questions that must
be answered.

“I want the fastest.”

“I want the most reliable.”

“I want the fastest and most reliable for under a certain price.”

“I just want to turn it on”

“We need to grow.”

Ask two people the same question and you’ll eventually get 15 different
answers. As previously said, part and parcel to a product’s performance
is company performance. Not everyone wants breakneck speed. PC buyers come with
all sorts of questions and expectations. One company, Chaintech, has a firm
foothold on one side of the planet but now have their sights set on the other
and successfully marketing a product is based in understanding the consumer
and successfully reviewing a product is based on examination of both the product
and the company that makes it.

To get answers to some of these questions is to understand who is making the
product, where they came from, what challenges and hurdles they encounter and
what they promise for the future. Chaintech faces, as all motherboard makers
do, a variety of factors in market growth and recession. The first two years
of the millennium saw a shrinking consumer market both in purchases and profit.
To survive a company must increase awareness and remain innovative. It’s
not an easy task.

Motherboard and VGA manufacturers do not advertise in the traditional sense
of the big three of television, radio or newsprint. They rely a lot on the media
involved with the PC industry. “Top of mind awareness” is a strategy
of hearing or reading of a product’s advantages and seeing that it’s
widely available on a continual basis. Chaintech invited us to go one on one
and we did.

Chaintech
has been in the motherboard game for nearly 20 years, since 1986, and ranks
sixth in the world yet they are a relative unknown in the North American market.
The names of highly visible motherboard makers like ABIT, ASUS and EPOX spring
to mind first while Chaintech resides in the shadows. This is the challenge
faced by Chaintech. The “new kids” on the block are veterans and
to understand their product is to understand the company itself and where it
came from and where it is going.

(l-r Simon Ho, President Chaintech Worldwide / Daphne Su, Vice
President of Sales and Marketing, Chaintech Worldwide / Cathy Liu, President
Chaintech America / Brennan Chow, Technical Manager, Chaintech America)

The answer to “who is” and “what do you think of Chaintech”
depends on what part of the world you are standing in at the moment. Cathy Liu,
President of Chaintech America led the conference and took the North American
media through the who and what of Chaintech.

Chaintech has 39 million USD in capital and employees over 1,000
people worldwide.

Chaintech is only surpassed by ABIT in sales for non tier 1 manufacturers.
The manufacturing facilities produced 200,000 motherboards a month, 250,000
VGA products a month and 50,000 IA (Information Access/Appliance) products a
month. This is accomplished by 13 SMT lines and 8 DIP & testing lines.

So what does all of this mean? The assumption can be made that Chaintech know
what they are doing by looking at the company’s 20 year history. Chaintech have
a firm foothold in most of Europe and Asia and are now are focused on the North
American market and a fickle market they are. Chaintech has several product
lines to meet consumer needs in the VGA and motherboard markets.

The Summit series

The Summit series is a mainstream product targeting users who want very competitively
priced products without the high-end bells and whistles.

The Apogee series

Apogee represents the performance middle ground with a few added features and
performance advantages while still maintaining a competitive price point.

The Zenith series

Zenith is the apex of Chaintech’s product line. Those products that bear the
name Zenith are the best that Chaintech offers. Zenith products are the latest
technology, chocked full of accessories and features and offer the bleeding
edge performance enthusiasts crave.

Zenith products are not necessarily more expensive when the cost of the extra
items in the package, if purchased separately, is factored in. Read Short-Media’s
in depth review of the Zenith
7NJS for a complete look. (7NJS Ultra product line featured in next image.
Note the new CBOX and remote.)

To stay in the limelight means a push for innovation. What that means to you
and I, the enthusiast, is “newer, better, faster, cheaper.” Product
cycles are becoming ridiculously short. Not everyone purchases at once so it
is a matter of keeping up with the “latest and greatest”. For a
manufacturer this presents a financial and time challenge.

The “newer, better, faster, cheaper” is the prime goal of the enthusiast.
A question was asked during the Chaintech Reloaded conference about Chaintech’s
plans for the type of memory on the FX5900 video card. The asker of the question
wanted to have a certain type of memory that would allow for faster speeds and
potentially higher overclocking. Simon Ho, President of Chaintech Worldwide,
responded and in his words was a lot of insight into how a product evolves.

The request was for a specific type of memory and the answer was basically
no. Mr. Ho explained that while the memory may be able to operate at the higher
specifications the product’s chip would not support it thus the added cost to
the final MSRP would be unjustified. Chaintech has to stay competitive. A consumer
may choose the competitor’s same product because it is a few dollars less and
the added cost of the faster memory in a VGA product, for example, may be useless
in both added cost and its effect on overall performance. It is interesting
that a cost-saving measure for the company has perhaps turned out to be in the
purchaser’s best interest.

This provided a unique insight into the world of why the same product line
may be subtly different from manufacturer to manufacturer. Profit margins are
shrinking and expectations are increasing and Chaintech does not deny this.
The manufacturer will receive a reference board then adapt it to how they plan
to establish a foothold in revenue. The best example at present is the NVIDIA
FX5200, FX5600 and FX5900 VGA products.

Chaintech has taken the reference product and, first and foremost, tackled
the cooling problems from earlier designs. Chaintech dubs their cooling technology
“Gas-Turbine Technology”. The Gas-Turbine Technology allows for less
than 30 dB of noise on the new FX5200-FX5900 VGA products. The Chaintech cooling
innovation also promises for higher overclocks due to the better cooling. Chaintech
says the FX61 runs 38.6 degrees Celsius on the GPU and 32.3 degrees Celsius
on the solder side. This is approximately 10 degrees cooler than the reference
design 15-20 degrees Celsius cooler than the tested “other brand”.
The specifics of the “other brand” were not divulged at the conference.

The complete FX5600 Apogee package was on display at the event. Chaintech continues
to provide a lot of extras inside the box. The package will contain the DVI-I
to VGA adapter, VIVO cable (4 in1), S-Video cable and a composite cable. One
item of interest was a retractable brush for dusting off both card and slot.
(And anything else that needs dusting). It is the silver-looking item at the
lower right. The green fuzzy ball is called Q BALL and it’s for dusting off
a monitor. Bundled software includes WinDVD 6 Channel, WinProducer3.0, 3Deep
and a Game pack (Rally Trophy, Serious Sam Second Encounter, Max Payne, Tropico
and Age of Wonders) Unfortunately only two are full versions.

• Graphic Engine : GeForce FX5600
• Memory Size : 128MB DDR
• Memory Interface : 128bit
• Engine Clock : 325 MHz
• Memory Clock Probable Range : 570 – 650 MHz
• VGA : Yes
• VIVO : Yes
• DVI-I : Yes
• Temperature Sensor : Yes
• PCB Layer : 8
• One slot design

This card has been around for a few months in various forms and Chaintech adds
eye-candy with LED lighting.

The Apogee line of VGA products has been rumored for June launches. Another
interesting point raised at the conference was why would the FX5900 line of
VGA products be under the Apogee name? FX5900 is a very high-end chip and Zenith
would be more appropriate. Chaintech responded by saying that they were satisfied
with their current FX5200-FX5900 products but felt they could bring more to
the enthusiast. Chaintech now leaves room for more features, options, add-ons
and bundled software for future releases by not launching the FX5200-FX5900
line under the Zenith name.

CBOX3

The present Zenith line of motherboards contain Chaintech’s CBOX2 front panel
IO. Now Chaintech has improved upon it with CBOX3.

The most attractive part of this bundle is what Chaintech calls the Handigator.
It is a similar product to ATI’s Remote Wonder and the Handigator offers remote
control functionality of the PC including the ability to power on and off the
PC via the remote.

The great advantage to this product will be for the Home Theatre PC users.
The DVD or music content can be controlled from the couch.

The challenge for the future may not be the technology itself but predicting
and meeting what the public will want. There is the immediate of Intel and AMD’s
64 bit offerings, the desktop PC redesign, a re-exploration of MicroATX and
small form factor and the ever present demand from the enthusiast for better,
faster and cheaper.

Conference Partners

Chaintech invited three of their partners to join the Reloaded 2003 event.

Intervideo

Barbara Finn from InterVideo
gave a preview of new software advances for products like WinDVD, WinProducer,
WinDVD Creator and WindDVR.

The platform demonstrated allowed for the home user to do some interesting
things.

WinDVD creator allows for the home NLE (non linear editor) to burn directly
to disc without having to render the timeline prior to burning. The rendering
is done while burning. Intervideo states this significantly cuts down on the
time spent at the PC (Time at desk) to complete a project because the user can
move onto other tasks while the software renders then burns the completed project.
The WinDVD Creator package features a host of other functions for capturing,
editing then burning and re-editing projects.

InterVideo have also remade the WinDVD platform to include such goodies as
time scaling. A DVD movie can be compressed into a specific time frame. If the
viewer only has 1.5 hours to watch a 2 hour movie then WinDVD’s new feature
will speed up the movie without pitching up the audio track thus eliminating
the unwanted effect of a bad Kung Fu movie on speed.

Corsair

Brett Kennedy, Product Manager XMS of Corsair
Memory gave his unique perspective to media presentations.

Corsair memory is known as one of the most rigorously tested memory modules
in the market today. Overclockers love it and Corsair strives to deliver.

Corsair also had their Hydrocool
unit on display.

Hydrocool
provides up to 200 Watts of cooling at low noise levels. The self contained
water-cooling unit features non-drip, quick connect hoses that can be disconnected
even while the unit is operational though it is not advised. It was demonstrated
and within seconds the CPU temperature began to climb. The connects are indeed
non-drip. There may only be a drop or two of residue fluid seen right after
disconnection but after that…nothing.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA continues the push with the FX series and Micah Stroud gave a sneak
peek at the GUI redesign in progress for NVIDIA’s overclocking at SoundStorm
utilities.

The FX5900 Ultra graphics display was impressive and in the very few minutes
of Overclocking playtime a Quake score of 360.1 FPS was obtainable.

NVIDIA’s SoundStorm GUI may now feature a smart function that detects as many
speakers are connected and self-configures the GUI accordingly. NVIDIA feels
this will take a lot of the guesswork out of SoundStorm.

NVIDIA will be releasing the new GUIs very soon along with NFORCE3
Pro which is NVIDIA’s solution for workstations. The NFORCE3 is a single-chip
solution designed for the AMD Opteron CPU. Highlights include NVIDIA RAID 0,
RAID 1 and RAID 0+1, NVIDIA Enterprise-Class Networking and, of course, 64-bit
architecture. NFORCE2 users need not look at NFORCE3 as something they are missing
out on. NFORCE3 is designed for workstation users and not performance enthusiasts.

NVIDIA is establishing a firm foothold in the motherboard market which means
that NVIDIA VGA cards will most likely work very well with NVIDIA chipset motherboards.
This will be great for NVIDIA VGA owners but may not be so readily accepted
by others.

What did we leave with?

There are a few perspectives on the question of “what did we leave with?”
There are the typical questions of when will the FX5900 be released and how
much? The answer is $499 USD estimated street price for the top of the line
Ultra 2-slot solution and $399 USD for the regular flavor FX5900. There are
the questions of what we learned but haven’t divulged. Chaintech has two rather
unique products in the up and coming phases that, if done correctly, will definitely
be on my personal shopping list; they appear to be that good.

Zenith buyers will get CBOX3 and Handigator. The Zenith 7NJS Short-Media reviewed
was a well designed and impressively appointed package that turned out very
good performance numbers for overclocking. Zenith targets enthusiasts right
in the cross hairs. The consumer will see the next revisions (Ultra) and Short-Media
will be there with a full review.

Beyond the product and today’s “hot item” was the company itself.
In every meeting and every seminar was Cathy Liu, President of Chaintech USA,
scribbling notes. Every person she spoke with she wrote down suggestions and
asked for more. Chaintech is actively looking for ways to improve their products
and reach the consumer. This may be expected from a new company looking to establish
themselves in the marketplace but Chaintech is anything but new. It was easy
to see that Chaintech wants to be in the North American market. It is not often
that the presidents roll up their sleeves and get down to basics with those
on the front lines. Chaintech’s 20 years of manufacturing and design in the
PC game represents a lot of innovation and experience. Meeting the people behind
the PCB gave us an enjoyable perspective on just who Chaintech is and where
they plan to go.

Keep this in mind as when reading Short-Media’s reviews and articles and those
of our colleagues; the past is equally as important to the present and the future.