Meanwhile RDRAM leaves this world, it seems that the dual-channel DDR SDRAM era now begins. Mainboard manufacturers now start to officially unveil their E7205 core-logic based mainboards.

Intel`s E7205 chipset previously code-named Granite Bay is also known as the E7205. It supports 400 and 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus of the Pentium 4 processors, can take advantage of the Hyper-Threading technology suppport, provides AGP 8x and dual-channel PC1600/2100 DDR SDRAM memory. The peak bandwidth offered by dual-channel PC2100 is 4.2GB per second, exactly equals to 533MHz Quad-pumped Pentium 4 bus. The North Bridge (or MCH) features the ICH4 I/O controller, supporting USB 2.0 and other necessary features.

Today DFI announced its NB80-E mainboard powered by the upcoming chipset from Intel. The technical specifications look as follows:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with 3.06GHz clock-speed and above (meets Northwood FMB2 Guidelines);
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• Intel E7205 chipset, including ICH4 South-Bridge;
• 4 DIMM slots for up to 4GB of PC2100 or PC2700 (533MHz FSB) DDR-SDRAM memory with ECC support. Dual-channel memory bus support: the memory modules should be identical and installed in pairs.
• 5 PCI slots, 1 AMR and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• Serial ATA-150/ATA-133 RAID controller, supporting one Serial ATA port and two ATA-RAID ports;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• 10/100/Mbit/s Ethernet adapter from Realtek;
• 6-channel audio solution with SPDIF support;
• Diagnostic LEDs;
• Card Reader support (Memory Stick, Secure Digital, Smart Card);
• Pretty poor overclocking functions, including Vcore adjusting and multiplier adjustments. Allows to set increased clock-rates for PCI and AGP busses;
• 6-layer PCB.
• ATX Form Factor;

No information on retail pricing and commercial availability.