X-bit labs

i850E at IDF.

Category: Other

by Anna Filatova

[ 02/27/2002 | 05:12 AM ]

At IDF you could also see a working mainboard based on i850E chipset. It was ASUS P4T1066.

The newcomer has pretty ordinary specifications. It is a Socket478 product equipped with an AGP 4x slot, 6 PCI slots, a USB 2.0 controller from NEC and ATA/133 RAID controller from Promise. However, there is one thing worth your particular attention. This mainboard supports RIMM 4200 RDRAM modules. RIMM4200 modules are a certain continuation of the PC800 modules. They work at 533MHz instead of 400MHz and feature 32bit bus instead of 16bit one. In fact, one RIMM4200 module is a combination of two PC1066 RDRAM RIMMs. That is why no wonder that there are only two RIMM4200 slots on ASUS P4T1066.

Frankly speaking, I doubt that RIMM4200 modules will find wide application after the launching of i850E. They are incompatible with the only PC800 RDRAM modules, which makes them less attractive than PC1066 RIMMs. And their only advantage over PC1066 is the fact that they needn’t necessarily be used in pairs in i850/i850E based mainboards.