AMD 4x4 motherboard pixellatedAsus baby shown in picturesBy Theo Valich: Wednesday 15 November 2006, 06:33WITH AMD POSTPONING the 4x4 launch at the 11th hour, readers found themselves deprived of 4x4 reviews hitting the wobbly wibble on the 14th of November, that is to say, yesterday. We asked around and could not get a straight answer to the fact why the launch has been postponed. Some of our sources were muddling around a "fact" that the CPU volume was not ready in order to have anything more than a paper launch.Regardless of that, we managed to get pictures and details of the Nforce 680a chipset, which will remain the only 4x4 supporting chipset until AMD prepares a revamped RD580 chipset - to be launched at the same time as the R600.Two 590SLI MCPs received fresh rebranding treatment and now they are called "680a MCP", and the board packs two of them. The way 4x4 works is simple: both 680a chips are connected to one FX CPU via 16x HT link; that CPU is talking to the second one using a 16x ccHT link.As you can see, two MCPs mean only one thing: a lot of features. In fact, an insane amount of them: 12 SATA-II connectors that can run two independent RAID5 arrays, 10 USB 2.0 ports (chipset supports 20), four hardware Gigabit Ethernet chips with TCP/IP Offload engine, each one with FirstPacket marchitecture. A teaming option is also available, so you can expect to be the server and the hub on every LAN party. Not that you will feel the difference.The motherboard is dubbed the LN64-SLI Deluxe and sports the traditional green colour of the PCB. It seems that Nvidia picked green for AMD boards, while boards The for Intel are receiving the black treatment.When it comes to the manufacturing side of things, Asustek really managed to get in bed with Nvidia, since the company is not only making all of the GeForce 8800 boards out there, but is a manufacturing partner for the 680a chipset as well.Asus pulled off an eATX design for two processor sockets, which are called L1FX instead of typical Socket 1207 nomenclature. Board comes with four PCIe x16 (electrical) slots: two of which work with 16, and two works with eight lanes (x8). The x1 and PCI slot are cornered and the owner of the board will be able to actually run only PCI board, since PCIe x1 is "eaten" by any dual-slot cooler. For instance, like the one that currently cools every GeForce 8800.The board should be available at the same time as FX-74 CPUs, which is currently slated for the end of November. We heard that November 30th is the new launch day, but nothing is set in stone yet. µ
