It becomes ridiculous, but I again have to tell you about certain computer components that made their appearance in Japanese retail prior to the official announcement. According to a news-story published here, on Saturday, September 21st, more than two weeks before the official launch, i845PE based mainboards from Albatron were seen being for sale in numerous stores.

Albatron, who entered the market only in late Spring 2002, now makes everything in order to attract attention of the customers. For instance, they launched two mainboards with silver coating a couple of days ago (see this news-story). Now they started to supply their PX845PEV and PX845PEV PRO products earlier than all their rivals, as a result, I again have to mention this company in our news-section.

Products offered by Albatron are not the most feature-rich mainboards, however, they are pretty durable and nice solutions for reasonable price. Here are the brief specifications of both:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with 3.06GHz clock-speed and above;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• i845PE chipset, including i82845PE MCH and i82801DA ICH4;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2100 or PC2700 (533MHz FSB) / PC1600 or PC2100 (400MHz FSB) DDR SDRAM memory.
• 5 PCI slots and 1 AGP 4x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• 4 USB 2.0 ports;
• 10/100/Mbit/s Ethernet adapter 3Com 3C910-A01 for PX845PEV PRO only;
• 6-channel AC`97 audio solution;
• ATX Form Factor.

The mainboard without integrated LAN adapter from 3Com costs $110, while the PX845PEV PRO with integrated Ethernet controller is priced at $120.

PS. Intel definitely did not like the noble impulse of Albatron and made the company to ask the retailers to remove the novelties off the shelves.