August has been a good month for Taiwan's mobo makers if no one else in the PC business. On average, they report last month's sales were up 20 per cent on July's figures.

The boost appears to have come from Intel's i845 chipset, though boards based on its predecessor, the Rambus-based i850, seem to have done quite well too, Taiwan's Commercial Times reports. And Abit, for one, said that AMD-oriented parts proved popular too.

Abit shipped 250,000 mobos in August, up 56 per cent on July. Exactly 20 per cent of those shipments - 50,000 units - were designed to take AMD processors.

Abit's shipments were dwarfed by the market's big guns. Elitegroup shipped 1.4 million mobos. Asustek, Gigabyte and MSI all experienced solid but unspectacular growth during August, but they expect September to be better. Both Asustek and Elitegroup reckon September's sales will propel them both to total Q3 shipments of ten million mobos or more.

Lesser player Chaintech saw shipments rise 25 per cent month on month to 210,000 units. ®