No chipset developer have yet introduced an I/O controller with Serial ATA support yet and it is said that VIA and SiS will only reveal their appropriate chips in the fourth quarter, while Intel plans to introduce its ICH5 next year. However, the leading hard disk drive makers have promised to start selling their Serial ATA products in September this year, hence, mainboard makers now have to use external controllers to allow their clients to use those new hard disc drives. A number of first-tier mainboard manufacturers have already announced their devices supporting Serial ATA and it seems that this standard is going to be a quite usual feature for middle to high-end mainboards that come this Fall.

AOpen has introduced their first mainboard with Serial ATA controller. The device is proposed for Intel`s Pentium 4 processors and based on i845E core logic. Since the chipset does not support HyperThreading technology, it may be doubtful that this board will be able to work with the Pentium 4 3.06GHz CPUs when they appear later this year. The technical specifications of this new product from AOpen are customary for such kind of devices:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 processors with 400/533MHz FSB;
• Intel 845E + ICH4 core-logic;
• 2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC1600 or PC2100 DDR SDRAM.
• 6 PCI, 1 AGP 4x and 1 CNR slot;
• Integrated 2-channel ATA-100 controller in addition to 2-channel ATA-133/Serial ATA 150 controller from Promise;
• 1 Serial ATA device supported;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Realtek;
• ALC650 6-channel audio solution;
• ATX Form Factor;
• Basic overclocking functions supported: FSB and Vcore adjustments.

AOpen has not only declined to inform the Internet media about the pricing and availability of the newcomer, but also has not announced the name of this novelty.