As we happened to know from our unofficial sources, Gigabyte decided to launch a dual FC-PGA/Socket370 mainboard on VIA Apollo Pro266. The board will be called GA-6RXDW and will be designed in ATX form-factor. There will be 4 DIMM slots for PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM (maximum 4GB), 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP Pro and 1 CNR slot. The mainboard will also support LAN PHY, 4 USB ports, ATA/100 (VT8233 South Bridge), Dual BIOS and will boast rich overclocking options (adjustment of voltages, FSB frequency, etc.).
They also report that the board should be shipped in Q2 2001. DDR SDRAM is very likely to get considerably cheaper by that time, because Gigabyte doesn’t need to hurry that much now.
So, now we know about three mainboards of the kind: SuperMicro 370DDI, Iwill DVD266-R (see our review here) and Gigabyte GA-6RXDW. It looks as if dual-processor solutions based on VIA Apollo pro266 are getting more and more popular among the mainboard manufacturers. And will they be also popular among the users? Probably, they will… But it will hardly happen soon, bearing in mind their performance and DDR high cost.