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ULi M1573 South Bridge with HD Azalia Audio and NCQ SATA Preview 2/2
Bluetooth / Grumpy 6 Dec 2004

Mainboard

Conclusion

Although we have heard about ATi SB450 south bridge which will start to appear in the months to come which offers similar feature set. To date, there are no other south bridges that delivers Azalia audio for the K8 platform. ULi M1573 south bridge can be said as a feature rich south bridge that can be paired up with PCI-E complaint north bridge like the ATi RS480 chipset. With ULi's design expertise in south bridges, ULi M1573 is definitely the south bridge to take advantage of the ATi RS480 North Bridge.

M1573 makes the ATi K8 platform a formidable challenger to the NF4 chipset. In comparison with the NF4 Ultra /NF4 chipset, the NF4 / NF4 Ultra chipset still lacks HD audio. Both supports RAID but ULi M1573 does not support the  flexibility of SATA/IDE RAID array. The ULi M1573 supports the 1.5GB/s with NCQ while the NF4 Ultra support 3.0Gb/s and NF4 support 1.5GB/s with NCQ. The NF4 comes Firewall built in which is not found on the ULi South Bridge. Gigabit Ethernet is integrated into the NF4 but it is only Fast Ethernet on ULi M1573. This can be compensated with  Gigabit Ethernet PCI-E external controller which offers good bandwidth as well.

Compared to the SiS 965 south bridge, the M1573 is already here. SiS 966 will be introduced early 2005 and 966 will support 10 USB 2.0 ports, two channels of ATA/133, four Serial ATA ports with AHCI and RAID, Gigabit Ethernet, High Definition Audio, and four PCI-E x1 interfaces.

ON the VIA front, the current VIA VT8237 doesn't offer as much. The VT8251 adds support for Intel's High Definition Audio standard. VT8251 will support the AHCI standard for Serial ATA drives with native command queue. 4 ports of SATA connectivity. All four of the drives connected to these ports will be able to participate in RAID arrays, with RAID levels 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD on offer. Two ATA/133 ports remain, as well, for older hard drives and other storage devices. VIA VT8251 leaves out Gigabit Ethernet support and stick with 100Mbps Ethernet. Similar to most mainboard manufacturers, GbE can be achieve through an external controller chip.

So far, Tul (Powercolor) will release 3 models using the ULi M1573 South Bridge pairing with ATi North Bridge.

* specs of chipsets are subjected to changes time to time. The accuracy is based on information obtained from the various websites.

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