Taiwan firms like new Intel chipsets

In conjunction with Intel's release of two new versions of the 845 chipset for Pentium 4 processors, Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, EPox and other major Taiwanese motherboard makers have unveiled a slew of new products with more powerful features that will dramatically increase the performance of computers.

The new motherboards incorporate new features such as RAID (redundant array of independent disks), which speeds data transfers and protects the data in the event of a power failure, and DDR 333 memory, a faster version of DDR DRAM memory used in computers today. MSI includes integrated Bluetooth functionality for wireless connections. "RAID has been a technology commonly used on servers," said Lio Qi Li, marketing director of Gigabyte Technology.

CNETAsia's Evan Chang reported from Taiwan.