In an unofficial talk with the leading mainboard manufacturers, which we have had recently, we found out that Intel is going to start shipping its new i845GE and i845PE chipsets officially supporting DDR333 in early July. The official launch of the new core logic sets, however, is scheduled only for October 7.

The new i845GE and i845PE chipsets are a logical continuation to the i845 family and add DDR333 support to its features. Both solutions will be based on i845G design and will be pin-compatible with it. However, i845PE will have no integrated graphics core onboard.

The support of faster memory subsystem will be not the only innovation in the new chipsets. Intel is also going to speed up the integrated graphics core of i845GE. It will be made by simply increasing the graphics core frequency. While the graphics core of i845G works at 200MHz, the one of i845GE will feature a core running at 266MHz.

Taking into account the upcoming shift to new chipsets, Intel is going to reduce the prices of the already exiting i845 solutions on June 30. The price of i845G will drop from $39 to $37, i845E – from $34 to $32, i845 – from $28 to $26, i845GL – from $31 to $29. We expect the new i845GE and i845PE to cost about $2 more than their analogues without the DDR333 support do: i845GE will officially sell at $39, while i845PE – at $34. Moreover, Intel is also planning to reduce all prices of the i845 solutions by another $2 before the official launch of the new DDR333 chipsets. It will happen on September 29.

The table below sums up all the feature of the i845 chipset family for your convenience: