We have already told you that many mainboard manufacturers have their products for Pentium 4 processors based on i845 B-Step chipset (supporting DDR memory) ready. That is why no wonder that some mass media appeared lucky to get hold of some samples boards. For instance, this Turkish site managed to get ASUS P4B266 mainboard on i845 B-Step chipset.
This upcoming solution boasts the following specs. The mainboard is designed in ATX form-factor, supports Socket478 Pentium 4 CPUs, features an AGP 4x slot, 6 PCI slots and a CNR slot. Besides, it is equipped with an integrated network controller and C-media sound controller. P4B266 has all the functions for proper overclocking experiments and is provided with the brand EZ-Plug connector supporting power supply units incompliant with the ATX 2.01 spec. ASUS P4B266 is expected to cost around $140-$150 at launch (that is some time in early 2002).
And now a few words about the first benchmarks results. The performance of P4B266 based on i845 B-Step chipset was compared with that shown by the boards on i845 and i850 chipsets. The system also included Pentium 4 1.5GHz CPU, GeForce3 based graphics accelerator and 256MB memory. Here is what they’ve got:

	i845 B-Step PC2100 DDR SDRAM	i845 PC133 SDRAM	i850 PC800 RDRAM
SYSmark2001. Office Productivity	140	131	144
SySmark2001. Content Creation	163	152	167
Quake3 Arena. Fast	178	152	185
3D Mark 2001. Default	6049	5510	6188

So, no wonder happened and i845 B-Step proved quite similar to the other DDR solutions for Pentium 4 available in the today’s chipset market. Like VIA P4X266 and SiS645 with PC2100 DDR SDRAM, i845 B-Step appeared just a little bit slower than its RDRAM counterpart, i850. It means that Int4el will be able to keep positioning its Rambus chipset as a high-performance platform solution for Pentium 4 processors. Like its predecessor, i845 B-Step is most likely to be offered as a cheaper and a bit slower solution. Moreover, the launching of i845 B-Step, which will cost almost the same money as the regular i845 supporting PC133 does, will definitely mean the end of the latter.
We would also like to point out that i845 B-Step seems very unlikely to outperform SiS645 with DDR333 memory, which implies that SiS has a very promising year ahead.