O Rly? The flase-marketing spot thread

[btarunr]

Ignorance is expensive and if you're not quite technically sound (or at least a little informed), you can be easily taken for a ride by companies, be it in any field. This thread in general lets you post your finds about unreal marketing schemes by companies to lure people to buy their stuff. Post pics, links, quotes, anything interesting you find and make this thread both amusing and useful.


Let me make a start:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/editorial/cebit2007-5/sm_x7dwa_bg.jpg

(Gen2 (PCI-Express) sounds okay but SLI :wtf:)

[hat]

uhh.... ya rly.
http://img.techpowerup.org/080209/sm_x7dwa_bg.jpg

[btarunr]

1. No such mention in the website, if it was a Seaburg with SLI, the website would be screaming SLI SLI !!!!!! louder than any orgasm.

2. No SLI interconnect bridge in the package

3. LOL

[hat]

Why else would there be 2 PCI-E x16 slots? Nobody is going to put a physix card on a server board. It's probably for Quadro cards or something... for professional rendering.

[btarunr]

Lot of workstation boards come with 2 or 3 slots being based on Intel chipsets, probably for the ATI FireGL and it's multi-GPU? Besides, Quadro certification is a big thing, again the website would scream it if it were true, no SLI interconnect :(

[panchoman]

http://img.techpowerup.org/080209/Capture030.jpg

do i spot an ati crossfire chip? or a group of amd/ati chipsets?

[btarunr]

That's a display controller from ATI, its neighbour is the Intel 52575EB dual-port network controller.

[panchoman]

wonder why a sli board needs an ati display controller now?

[btarunr]

Most server/workstation boards come with that display controller from ATI, they come with a teeny weeny 8~16 MB frame-buffer (the hynix chip you see next to it). And yes, this isn't a SLI board.

[panchoman]

most sever chipsets cant do sli etc...

what chipset does that board use?

[btarunr]

Intel 5400 aka "Seaburg" chipset. The same that powers the beastly Skulltrail.

[panchoman]

well skulltrail can do sli and xfire..

[xfire]

Windows Vista-The WOW starts now.

[panchoman]

actually bta

the intel 5400 cant do sli or crossfire, it relies on nforce 100 chips that it is connected to via the use of 2 pci x16 1.0 lines to the nforce 100 chips and those 2 chips each supply 2 x16 1.0 slots, giving you 4 slots. on the board above, it seems that there are no nforce 100's and just the 2 x16 1.0 lines that go straight to the slots instead of the nforce 100's as it is in skulltrail.

http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/514/block.jpg

-image courtesy of pc perspective.

[btarunr]

I never said 5400 could do SLI ? Besides, Foxconn did work on a X38 based board that has some sort of MacGyver "NVidia dual-graphics"....something they're not calling SLI...and that board has no NForce 200. BTW Skulltrail uses two NForce 100 chips.

http://img.hexus.net/v2/internationalevents/computex2007/JARS/Wednesday/DSCF3977_cropped-big.jpg

[Namslas90]

A few intresting things in the users manual though, but No mention of SLI;

The Intel 5400 MCH (North Bridge)
The 5400 MCH (North Bridge) provides two FSB processing interfaces, four
fully buffered (FBD) DIMM memory channels, PCI-Express x4 bus interfaces
confi gurable to form x8 or x16 ports, an EB2 South Bridge Interface (ESI) and
SMBus Interfaces for system management, and DIMM Serial Presence Detect
(SPD). The PCI-Express x4 interfaces can be confi gured to form x8 or x16 ports
that can operate up to Gen-2 speeds in x16 confi guration for enhanced graphics
applications.

SMB to PCI-X/PCI-E Slots
Speeds
Jumpers JI2C1/JI2C2 allow you to connect
PCI-X slots to the System Management
Bus, and Jumpers JI2C3/JI2C4 allow
you to connect PCI-Exp. Slots to the
System Management Bus for enhanced
power management. The default setting
is to close pins 2-3 to disable the connection.
See the table on the right for
jumper settings.

Frequency for PCI-X#1~PCI-X#2
This option allows the user to change the bus frequency for the devices installed
in the slot indicated. The options are Auto, PCI 33 MHz, PCI 66 MHz, PCI-X 66
MHz, PCI-X 100 MHz, and PCI-X 133 MHz.
Slot0 PCI-U. x8, Slot1 PCI-X 100/133 MHz, Slot2 PCI-X 133 MHz,
Slot3 PCI 33 MHz, Slot4 PCI-Exp x16, Slot5 PCI 33 MHz, and Slot6
PCI-Exp x16

the board supports both PCI-X and PCI-E

Supermicro - http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/results.cfm

Would be intresting to know what could be done with a BIOS MOD though.

[panchoman]

i believe that skulltrail uses nforce 100's

nforce 200 is only in the 780i/a atm.

[btarunr]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Diamond/HD_3850_Ruby_Edition/images/package2.jpg

THX....yeah right. News in that was a mistake but it certainly would've added to the pick-up value of the box and there could be hundreds of such boxes in stores all over the world. Would Diamond recall them just to place a black sticker over the THX logo? Will the THX sue Diamond Multimedia? The drama begins. It's discussed here: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=52435