DFI Launches i845 P4 Motherboards

Despite all the hoopla about the Pentium 4, we haven't seen a ton of boards that support it. Part of the reason is that Intel has made it a bit confusing for the motherboard makers. Will they be in trouble if they support the VIA P4X266? Has Intel abandoned Rambus? Should mobo makers heed Intel's request that they delay shipping i845-based systems? At this point, I can comfortably say that Intel's pretty much made a mess of the P4 release. Has the company gotten lots of press? Sure. Has the P4 stunned the world with its popularity? Not yet. Can I set a record for putting question marks in a news story? Maybe. Anyway, the story here is that i845-based motherboards are starting to see the light of day since Intel just officially announced the chipset's release, and DFI just told us about its new i845 SDRAM motherboard-based motherboards, the NB72 and NB32. NB72 uses the Socket 478 specification with an ATX board design, and supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 processors made by both 0.18 and 0.13 micron manufacturing process. The NB72 has three built-in SDRAM DIMM memory slots and supports a maximum of 3GB SDRAM (PC100/PC133). It has five PCI slots, one CNR slot, and a 4x AGP slot (1.5 V), along with 4 USB connectors. You can also pick up a version that supports RAID called the DFI NB72-SR (shown above). The NB32 is in a microATX form factor, with a version called the NB32-SL that has built-in LAN functionality. Both the NB72 and NB32 support ATA100/66/33, AC'97 audio, and STR (Suspend to RAM). They also provide hardware monitor and Wake On Events functions. I'll bet we see more P4 boards from other companies this week. And remember that i845 chipsets also support DDR-SDRAM (which will require more new boards) but Intel is telling motherboard makers that it doesn't want i845/DDR platforms before January 2002, probably to see how RDRAM fares. Do you want to use faster memory without buying into the evil Rambus empire? Does Intel care? Have I set the question mark record yet?