A number of Intel E7205 (Granite Bay) and E7505 (Placer) mainboards appeared for sale in Japan this weekend, as reported at Akiba. Frankly speaking, I cannot call such start as massive because there are only a few mainboards powered by the mentioned chipsets at the moment, but shortly there will appear a lot more devices based on the mentioned core-logic sets.

During the weekend the following products made their appearance:

MSI E7205 Master-F: Intel E7205 + ICH4 chipset; 4 DIMM slots for PC1600 and PC2100 memory; AGP 8x, 5 PCI + 1 miniPCI slot for an additional device, such as, FireWire (IEEE1394) controller, SCSI controller or a simple graphics card; 2-channel ATA-33/66/100; 10/100/1000Mb/s Ethernet controller from Broadcom; 6-channel AC'97 sound; USB 2.0; ATX; See the picture here. Available for $230 - $255.

IWILL P4GB: Intel E7205 + ICH4 chipset; 4 DIMM slots for PC1600 and PC2100 memory; AGP 8x, 6 PCI; 10/100/1000Mb/s Ethernet controller from Intel; 6-channel AC'97 sound; USB 2.0; ATX; See the picture here. Showcased in Japan.

Supermicro P4SAA: Intel E7205 + ICH4 chipset; 4 DIMM slots for PC1600 and PC2100 memory; AGP 8x, 6 PCI; AC'97 sound; USB 2.0; ATX; See the picture here. Showcased in Japan.

Iwill DP533 (Dual Socket 604): Intel 7505 chipset, including Placer MCH, ICH4 and P64H2; 4 DIMM slots for PC1600 and PC2100 memory; AGP 8x Pro, 2 PCI, 3 PCI-X (2x100MHz; 1x133MHz); 2-channel ATA-33/66/100; 2-channel Ultra 320 SCSI controller from Adaptec; 10/100/1000Mb/s Ethernet controller; AC'97 sound; USB 2.0; ATX; See the picture here. Available for $480 - $520;

RIOWORKS PDPEA (Dual Socket 604): Intel 7505 chipset, including Placer MCH, ICH4 and P64H2; 4 DIMM slots for PC1600 and PC2100 memory; AGP 8x Pro, 2 PCI, 3 PCI-X (2x100MHz; 1x66MHz); 2-channel ATA-33/66/100; Promise PDC20271 ATA-33/66/100/133 RAID controller; 10/100/1000Mb/s Ethernet controller from Broadcom; AC'97 sound; USB 2.0; ATX; See the picture here. Available for $425;

The price on the E7205 based mainboard is not so low as one might expected. In fact, this is the first time the product made its appearance, moreover, in Japan the computer hardware is always a bit overpriced, finally, the MSI E7205 Master-F is equipped with a rather expensive 1Gbit/s Ethernet controller , as a result, the price of such advanced mainboard is really high at the moment. On the other hand, since E7205 is intended for workstations, manufacturers may launch very feature-rich products with a very high price for the real computer geeks or those, who needs the features for his work. Therefore, E7205 will have less chances to become “the killer” of i850E and RDRAM on the PC market.

Currently one can get a mainboard on i850E core-logic for about $140, according to Pricwatch and a couple of 256MB PC1066 RDRAM modules for $204 in total. The whole bundle will cost you $344 plus delivery. A pair of PC2700 DDR SDRAM 256MB modules is sold for $102 excluding delivery at the moment. In case E7205 based mainboard costs about $200, it seems that the system will be more feature-rich and offer the same or slightly better speed in various applications, while still costing less than the i850E powered one.

All in all, let us wait for the E7205 maiboards to appear massively and then we will be able to make our final marketing prediction, maybe even based on hardware tests.