Gigabyte Technology appeared to be the first company to start shipping VIA KT400 based mainboards. During the weekend, a number of Japanese stores started to sell its GA-7VAXP, as I have read over here. Although this board is the only product of such kind that can be purchased at the moment, we may expect the other mainboard makers to begin selling their VIA KT400 based devices in the course of this week.

I want to stress that Gigabyte declared DDR400 support in the manual, however, they clearly noted that only the following modules are supported:

• 128 and 256MB DDR400 CL3 modules from Micron;
• 128 and 256MB DDR400 CL3 modules from Samsung;
• 256MB DDR400 CL2.5 modules from Apacer.

Gigabyte GA-7VAXP is quite a feature-rich board, offering a lot of modern technologies:

• Supports all Socket A Athlon XP/Athlon/Duron processors (possibly, the up and coming Athlon XP 2700+ with 333MHz FSB as well);
• VIA KT400 chipset with VT8235 I/O Controller;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of PC2100 (DDR266), PC2700 (DDR333) and DDR400 DDR SDRAM;
• 5 PCI and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel integrated ATA/133 controller plus external Promise 20276 RAID controller;
• 10/100/Mbit/s Ethernet Adapter;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• 3 FireWire (IEEE1394) ports;
• Integrated AC`97 6-channel ALC650 audio solution with SP/DIF connectors;
• Memory Stick, Secure Digital and Smart Card Readers;
• Dual BIOS;
• Overclocking functions.

The board itself costs starting from ¥13,800 to ¥15,800 ($115 - $130) what is not too expensive at all, especially considering that the hardware in Japan is a bit overpriced compared to the USA and Europe.