Industry-Grade Motherboards include PCI Express.
Press Release Summary:
Models 889LCD/ATX and 889LCD/ATXU are ATX and Micro ATX motherboards, respectively, based on Intel® Pentium® 4 LGA 775 processors running at up to 3.8 GHz. Celeron processors are optional. Model 889LCD/ATX is equipped with 2 PCI Express x1 slots for I/O assemblies and 1 PCI Express x16 slot for graphics or ADD2 cards. Model 889LCD/ATXU offers one each of PCIe x1 and PCIe x16, as well as 2 PCI. Both include 4 GB DDR2 533/400 SDRAM, 800 or 533 MHz FSB, and ICH6 chipset.
Original Press Release:
Industry-grade ATX and Micro-ATX Motherboards with Kontron PCI Express
Highest performance I/O connection thanks to PCI Express
Eching / Nuremberg, Germany, February 22, 2005: With the 889LCD/ATX and 889LCD/ATXU, Kontron introduces two industry-grade ATX and Micro ATX motherboards with Intel® Pentium® 4 or Celeron® processors respectively, which, besides their long-term availability, dazzle with the maximum I/O performance thanks to PCI Express. The industrial ATX motherboard 889LCD/ATX is conveniently equipped with two PCI Express x1 slots for I/O assemblies and one PCI Express x16 slot for graphics or ADD2 cards. Four classic PCI slots are also available. The space-saving Micro ATX motherboard 889LCD/ATXU offers one each of PCIe x1 and PCIe x16, as well as two PCI.
Thus, both boards are ideally equipped for the forthcoming range of PCI Express expansion cards. The first available PCI Express x1 expansion cards offer RAID, SCSI, SATA, Firewire, Gigabit LAN, video or Framegrabber functions, to name just a few. Furthermore, many high-performance PCI Express x16 graphics cards are already available on the market.
These two motherboards with PCI Express are particularly attractive because one PCIe x1 slot with 250 MB/s in full duplex operation is almost twice as fast as one PCI slot and the PCIe x16 slot offers a performance of approximately 16 GB/s per direction. That is clearly better than AGP. Another major advantage for the system performance is that PCI Express establishes point-to-point connections via switches. Therefore the connected I/O assemblies no longer have to share bandwidth and slow plug-in cards don't slow down faster ones.
As well as the extremely high-performance PCI Express bus, both motherboards are equipped with Intel Pentium 4 LGA 775 processors up to 3.8 GHz and support HT technology (hyperthreading). Economical Celeron processors are also available as an alternative. Divided between four DIMM slots, the RAM layout is very generous with up to 4 GB DDR2 533/400 SDRAM and the front-side bus with 800 MHz or 533 MHz, as well as the ICH6 chipset, also contribute to the efficiency of this high-performance motherboard. Both boards offer eight USB 2.0 ports (four internal), one Gbit Ethernet, PS/2 for keyboard and mouse, as well as one serial and one parallel port, plus audio as standard. Storage media connect via four (or, with the Micro ATX, two) SATA 150, one ATA100, and one FDD interface. Moreover, both boards offer comprehensive graphics support for two independent monitors.
Control of flat displays
In addition to the Intel AGP/DVO standard, the PCI Express x16 slot of both boards also offers serial DVO, so that digital flat-screens can be very economically connected to the chipset-integrated graphics via an ADD2 card. They represent the most cost-effective solution for the control of digital displays. Kontron already has an ADD2 DVI card in its product line and an ADD2 LVDS card is currently in development.
API board support
As an add-on, Kontron offers free API support for both boards, for functions such as temperature and fan control, S.M.A.R.T. information query of hard drives, Watchdog control, or CPU throttling, and all via TCP/IP.
