We've simply lost count of the number of TNT2 based boards but one trend we did notice was a lack of TNT2 Ultra parts. Upon closer inspection at ELSA, who currently does NOT have a TNT2 Ultra within the product range, we were told that initial TNT Ultra parts were not dishing the yields necessary for the product to become 'mainstream' just yet. ELSA is banking on the yields improving and should indeed start shipping two versions of the ERASER III: with the TNT2 Ultra chip set by the end of July (with their 3D Revelator glasses). One of the boards will ship at a default clock speed of 150/175 whilst the other will be higher at 175/200MHz.

The TNT2 bandwagon seems to be facilitating itself into the motherboard sector. PowerColor (just one of many) showed us their DreamReal Intel BX 133MHz FSP (front-side bus speed) motherboard with an embedded 16MB SDRAM TNT2 graphics controller on-board. Gordon Peng, VP of Sales at PowerColor, said that the 16MB TNT2 based motherboard will go on sale in Fry's Electronics (just don't bring your AMEX) sometime in the next couple of weeks. 32MB support is currently being reviewed…

Today was the first time we 'physically' got a whiff of the Intel Camino chipset behind closed doors. Several Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers had reference designs of Camino (820) based motherboards, all of which had the following specifications:

1x1 AGP 4X slot
5x1 PCI slots
1x1 ISA slot
1x1 AMR slot (the new Audio & modem)

OEMs were not confident in terms of the RAMBUS issues being sorted out in time for an October launch of the Camino.

Here's one for server fans (us included), we also saw a Dual Carmel (Dual 820/Camino) WTX form factor (pizza-sized) PIII Xeon based mainboard for server workstations. With its Dual channel RAMBUS technology the bandwidth is up to a whopping great 8Gigabytes! Oh it will also require some 800watts of power (not exactly environmentally friendly eh?). Besides the AGP Pro port, the mainboard sported two PCI64 slots and the usual 5x1 PCI and still one ISA slot.