It's when your stomach is growling that you're known to have the best ideas. And ALi's stomach is growling particularly loudly right now. The Taiwanese chipset producer has not been able to gain a foothold in the market for quite some time. About six months ago, the only marginally successful Aladdin TNT2 chipset was launched, but only racked up sales in the OEM business. Now the spotlight is on their latest chipset, dubbed "Magik 1".

It offers support for DDR-SDRAM memory in conjunction with the Socket 462 platform (Socket A - for AMD Athlon and Duron). So far, so good. ALi is in direct competition with the Taiwanese manufacturer VIA, which has just started to ship its DDR chipset KT266. The current performance ruler of the SocketA-platform however, is AMD's 760 chipset, which delivers the highest performance for Athlon processors right now.

It is true however, that only very few boards with AMD 760 chipset end up in the retail market. It leaves ALi the chance to win customers with Magik1's low price and the buzzword 'DDR-support. Tom's Hardware put four boards - based on "ALi Magik 1" - through a practically oriented test procedure.