VIA Releases Two New P4X266A Mobos

Only a few weeks ago, VIA Technologies let us know about its new P4X266A . Now that the company is also in the motherboard business, it stands to reason that it would be the first to market with boards based on the chipset. This week, VIA announced the P4XB-RA and P4XB-SA motherboards based on P4X266A for the Pentium 4 platform. VIA says the VIA P4X266A chipset offers a memory performance gain of up to 20% over its P4X266. The ATX-sized VIA P4XB-RA and VIA P4XB-SA mobos support up to 3GB of DDR266 SDRAM and 400 MHz FSB for 478-pin Pentium 4 processors at speeds of 2GHz and beyond. The VIA P4XB-RA mainboard also offers onboard audio capabilities via a C-Media six-channel audio chip, and support for IDE RAID via an onboard Promise PDC20265R controller for RAID modes 0 and 1. Both the P4XB-RA and P4XB-SA provide three DIMM slots, one AGP 4X slot, five PCI slots and one CNR slot. The P4XB-R and P4XB-S motherboards with the same configuration but the earlier P4X266 chipset are also available. VIA also now has a website devoted to its motherboard business . One can only imagine how thrilled VIA's chipset customers are that the company put out boards that use the chipset before they could get one to market.