VIA, to be more exact, VIA’s VSPD division, made an official press-release last week announcing two new mainboards based on P4X400 chipset. These are P4PB 400-FL and P4PB 400-L.

I would like to make three comments right away:

• You probably believe that they have also announced their P4X400 chipset together with the boards? You are mistaken then, as there hasn’t ever been a press-release about it, so it appears that VIA’s division released a mainboard based on a chipset, which has never been launched by VIA. :) Well, this is how greatly VIA is afraid of the public anger, which might burst out once another pseudo-new chipset is launched. As you remember, P4X400 differs from P4X333 only by the implemented support of PC3200/DDR400 memory. VIA also tries to pretend that P4X333 doesn’t support AGP 8x (P4X400 supports it officially), but this is not a good move: why should they try to conceal evident things.
• Surprising as it might seem, but VSPD was far not the first one to start making these boards. One of VIA’s outsourcing partners, Soltek company announced the beginning of mass sales of their SL-85ERV/85ERV-L mainboards based on VIA P4X400.
• DDR400 memory (PC3200) is listed in the mainboard specs, even though JEDEC committee hasn’t yet approved of this standard. This way, P4X400 appeared the world’s first chipset officially supporting DDR400. As far as I understand, it is also the world’s first chipset officially supporting the memory standard, which doesn’t actually exist.

And now I would like to say a few words about the specs of the boards, which differ from one another only by the IEEE1394a controller. They are designed in ATX form-factor, support Socket478 CPUs with 400MHz/533MHz QP bus, feature 3 DIMM slots for up to 3GB PC3200/PC2700/PC2100/PC1600 DDR SDRAM, 5 PCI, 1 CNR slot. The boards also support AGP 8x, ATA/133, AC’97 sound (VT8235 South Bridge). The mainboards are equipped with 6 USB 2.0 ports, 6-channel VIA VT1616 sound controller, optional VIA VT6306 IEEE1394a (Firewire) controller (it is available only by P4PB 400-FL mainboard). Both products support FliteDeck technology. All in all, they are pretty worthy, as the specs say.