Though the announcements of new mainboards on i845 chipset with DDR SDRAM support keep cropping up nearly every single day, there is always some room for originality. Supermicro Company known for its extreme "fertility" concerning the new server solutions announced two very interesting novelties. They are SUPER P4SBR and SUPER P4SBE.
SUPER P4SBR is an ATX mainboard for Socket478 Pentium 4 CPUs (supports both: 0.18micron and 0.13micron Pentium 4 processors). It is equipped with 3 DIMM slots for up to 3GB PC133/PC100 SDRAM and 5 PCI slots. The board also has integrated ATI Rage XL graphics (8MB frame buffer), integrated Adaptec AIC-7899 dual-channel Ultra160 SCSI controller, overheating sensor, jumperless technology support, four fan connectors and chassis intrusion detector. There is no AGP slot for external graphics cards onboard.
The second mainboard called SUPER P4SBE differs from P4SBR by the absence of the built-in SCSI controller that is why it doesn’t make any sense to list its specs here.
To tell the truth, we can’t remember anything of the kind. As is known, Pentium4 has never proven that fast in server applications even when working in dual-processor systems equipped with RDRAM (i860 chipset). And here we have one single CPU with the slowest combination of i845 and SDRAM, and even no AGP slot...
Although Supermicro targets these solutions for the Low-End server and workstation market, we suspect that they will never be very popular there. Since there are hardly too many users who may need a combination of the kind. Anyway, Supermicro is not a novice in this field, they must know what they are doing...