Caused by VIA, which hurried to launch its P4X266A chipset revision. As a result, there remained a lot of chipsets of the previous revision, P4X266, in Elitegroup’s stocks (our sources report that there are around 1 million chipsets left!). Moreover, there are not only chipsets, but also ready mainboards built on the older VIA P4X266 chipset.
One of the actions undertaken by Elitegroup in order to sell out everything connected with P4X266 as soon as possible is two press releases made today, where the company announced two more mainboards built on this notorious chipset, which started shipping in August. They are an ATX solution called P4VXAS and MicroATX solution called P4VXMS. Note that of all the mainboard modifications available these two seem to be the least attractive. Firstly, both mainboards are equipped with DIMM slots for PC133 SDRAM, and secondly, they support Socket423 Pentium 4 processors.
Although we do respect the today’s leader of the mainboard supplies a lot, we don’t have any idea who on earth may need this "wonder of engineering" today. Especially taking into account that SiS645 based mainboards start getting a real mass product and i845 B-Step chipset is about to be launched soon. The only application for these mainboards seems to be some value system built with a Pentium 4 1.5GHz CPU, for instance.