It’s no wonder that at the CeBIT show (which ended on March 20) the majority of mainboard manufacturers has presented products, based on the future i845G, i845E and i850E chipsets (who could doubt!). While the last two do not arouse any interest (what’s the interest in an increased bus frequency, if the current i850 works well at 533 MHz QP FSB), the i845G chipset seems to be rather outstanding because of the "absolutely new graphics core" from Intel.

Unfortunately, the results of the tests with the i845G graphics core have been neither published anywhere, nor reported at the show (Intel never says about the performance of its products before their official release). Thus, we can only watch the boards and wait...

• ABIT BG7 (photo)
• ACORP 845GDA (photo)
• AOpen AX4G Pro (photo)
• ASUSTeK P4B533-VM (photo)
• ECS L4IBMG2 (photo)
• EPoX 4GA+ (photo)
• FIC VC37 (photo)
• Gigabyte GA-8IGXP (photo)
• MSI MS-6580 (photo)
• Soltek SL-85MR (photo)

Interesting thing! Among ten listed mainboards only three are made in MicroATX form-factor (ASUS, ESC and FIC)! The question is, what is integrated graphics in a regular full-size PC meant for? The story with i845/nForce420 is repeating again: a not too fast video "in addition" may frighten away all the potential full-size mainboard consumers. A different thing is an office PC in a desktop case and with everything integrated on the MicroATX board (graphics, sound, network, etc.) In other words, the story is old, so I will not repeat.