Our friends from Clubic got some news about a new mainboard from Gigabyte based on i845 B-Step chipset supporting DDR SDRAM.
The GA-8IRX mainboard is designed in ATX form-factor, supports Socket478 Pentium 4 CPUs and features 3 DIMM slots for the maximum 2GB PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM, 6 PCI slots, an AGP 4x and a CNR slot. Besides, there is ATA/100 support (ICH2), integrated Creative CT5880 sound. The board supports Dual BIOS, Q-Flash and EasyTune III technologies.
We would like to mention separately that all the three DIMM slots can be used only if two of the DIMMs are single-sided. This limitation is imposed by the chipset (4 banks/2GB), which cannot be taken that seriously, actually. To be fair we should say that the competing chipset from VIA, P4X266, supports 6 banks of the regular memory and 8 banks of the Registered memory.
The mass supplies of GA-8IRX should start on December 10. It is expected to cost around $140.