Following in ASUS’s footsteps, many other mainboard manufactures hurried to let some more info on their i845 B-Step based products leak. We managed to hear some news on the upcoming mainboard from Chaintech based on Intel 845 B-Step chipset for Pentium 4 processors supporting DDR memory. The board is called CT-9BJD0.
It is designed in ATX form-factor, supports Socket478 Pentium 4 CPUs and features an AGP 4x slot, 5 PCI slots and 1 CNR slot. There are 2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM. By the by, i845 chipset supports only 4 memory banks that is why most mainboard manufacturers decided to provide their mainboards only with 2 DIMM slots. The boards built on the same i845 B-Step chipset, which will boast 3 DIMM slots (such as ASUS P4B266) will allow involving all of them at the same time only in case single-side memory modules will be used. Returning to Chaintech 9BJD0 we have to stress that besides the already mentioned features, the board will be also equipped with an integrated 6-channel PCI sound controller: C-media CMI8738.
As you remember, the official day for the sales of i845 B-Step based mainboards to start is January 1, 2002. Nevertheless, we expect the boards of the kind to appear in some hardware stores in late December already.