Motherboards make the most of PCI Express I/O

Kontron has released two industrial-grade ATX and Micro ATX motherboards with Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron processors which combine long-term availability with PCI Express I/O performance.

Kontron has released two industrial-grade ATX and Micro ATX motherboards with Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron processors which combine long-term availability with maximum I/O performance thanks to PCI Express.

The 889LCD/ATX is an industrial ATX motherboard 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 889LCD/ATXU is a space-saving Micro ATX motherboard that offers one each of PCIe x1 and PCIe x16, as well as two PCI slots.

So 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 and frame-grabber 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 a PCIe x1 slot with 250Mbyte/s full duplex operation is almost twice as fast as a PCI slot and the PCIe x16 slot offers a performance of approximately 16Gbyte/s each way, making it considerably faster than AGP.

Another major advantage for system performance is that PCI Express establishes point-to-point connections via switches, and so the connected I/O assemblies no longer have to share bandwidth and slow plug-in cards do not 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 3.8GHz and support HT (Hyper-threading) technology.

Economical Celeron processors are also available as an alternative.

Divided between four DIMM slots, the RAM layout is very generous with up to 4Gbyte DDR2 533/400 SDRAM, and the 800 or 533MHz front-side bus and ICH6 chipset also contribute to the efficiency of this high-performance motherboard.

Both boards offer eight USB 2.0 ports (four internal), gigabit 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.

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 integrated graphics chipset via an ADD2 card.

Kontron already has an ADD2 DVI card in its product line and an ADD2 LVDS card is under development.

As an addon, Kontron offers free API support for both boards, for functions such as temperature and fan control, SMART information query of hard drives, watchdog control, or CPU throttling, and all via TCP/IP.

Both boards are available immediately.

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