Whether SoftMenu III will hit non-440BX boards is uncertain at this time, but ABIT expressed hope that it would happen. It will be interesting to see how much speed tweaking the i820 chipset is capable of bearing.

ABIT will essentially be producing what NVIDIA is offering. We expect them to be a bit behind the competition with NV11 and NV15 products, learning from the mistakes of others before they go into full production. The idea has its advantages, but again, it seems a bit conservative for the lightning paced video card market.

At CEBIT, ABIT announced their Hot Rod 100, a PCI upgrade for ATA/100. It will come out in April, well before ATA/100 drives hit the market, so if you want to be ready for the next level of IDE speed, ABIT will have the hardware you want. We asked them about serial ATA, USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 as well but they had no information for us.

The most important thing we learned from ABIT is that the i820 chipset, or Camino, is here to stay. It is Intel's chipset of choice and, like it or not, Intel controls most of the market. If they say you are going to have a PC with RDRAM, chances are darn good that someday you will, even if it takes a while for others to cave in. So if you are thinking of purchasing an i820 motherboard but are worried that Intel is going to abandon RDRAM or bring out something a thousand times better next week, fear not. They will, however, bring out a stepped version of the i820 soon, hopefully fixing their ECC SDRAM troubles (which effected almost nobody anyway).