As we have expected, the first mainboards built on the new DDR Pentium 4 chipset – i845 B-Step – started cropping up in retail. Although Intel will officially announce its i845 B-Step only on December 17, the mainboard manufacturers have been receiving this solution in mass quantities since late November already. That is why some of them couldn’t help starting to sell their new products prior to the official chipset launch.
Some Japanese stores, which are usually the first to offer new products, are now selling i845 B-Step based mainboards from MSI and FIC: MSI 845 Ultra-AR and FIC VC15.
Here are the boards’ specs:

• MSI 845 Ultra-AR. This Socket478 mainboard features 3 DIMM slots for PC2100/PC1600 DDR memory, an AGP 4x slot, 5 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot. Besides, there is an integrated Promise 20276 ATA/133 IDE RAID controller and an integrated C-media sound controller.
• FIC VC15. This Socket478 mainboard features 3 DIMM slots for PC2100/PC1600 DDR memory, an AGP 4x slot, 6 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot. There is also an integrated 10/100Mbit Ethernet controller from Realtek and AC’97 sound.

The boards sell at $170 (MSI solution) and $155 (FIC solution).
Although Intel tried to be very convincing when they asked the mainboard manufacturers to refrain from starting the sales of these products before the official chipset launch, i.e. before the New Year, we expect i845 DDR solution to become available worldwide quite soon.