DFI's Granite Bay mobo revealed

IT'S BEEN A WHILE SINCE we laid eyes on Intel's Granite Bay board specification. We saw one such baby powered with a professional version of the R300 core now called FireGL X1 at Computex and we thought back then that that this chipset had some potential since it offered so much bandwidth.

We now have some details of DFI's Granite Bay offering, which it has decided to call the NB80 EA. Intel will hide the nice Granite Bay code name behind the not so nice Intel E7205 chipset label, as revealed here yonks back.

This Intel E7205 chipset will be based on Intel's E7205 memory controller hub (MCH - we call it Northbridge) and the Intel 82801 I/O Controller hub aka ICH4 that we call Southbridge.

As for system memory, the board will support a dual channel 144-bit wide memory interface where each will support 2 Dim sockets and will be able to address up to 4 GB memory. It will be suggested to use Synchronous operation with the system bus and use DDR 2100, DDR 266 with 533 MHz FSB or DDR 1600, DDR200 with 400 MHz FSB P4s.

The board will feature a nice award Bios features with a lot of tuning possibilities, a 20-bit full duplex audio codec with SPDIF in and out and 6 channel audio output. The board will also have a Realtek RTL8100 Ethernet card, four UDMA 33, 66 or 100 devices, S-ATA interface as well as Raid 0 (stripping) or 1 (mirroring) on board.

The NB80EA will be use ATX design, AGP 8X port and 5 PCI slots as well as one CNR lot.

Diamond Flower International will include onboard integrated media reader with support for security application smart card interface and support for memory stick interface and secure memory card interface. Plus 4 USB 2.0 ports, a network card, 2 serial ports, one parallel port, two PS2 ports for keyboard and mouse and 3 audio jacks and lot of additional connectors.

Granite Bay in its DFI implementation looks promising and we assume that Dual DDR chipset could give Rambus platforms a run for their money.

As for availability and pricing, we will have to wait for Intel to launch its chips first but we expect to see some samples in November time frame.

ASUSTeK also yesterday unveiled a dual-channel DDR 333 motherboard for the Pentium 4 — the P4SDX, which is based on the SiS 655 chipset. The P4SDX supports Serial ATA and AGP 8X, as well as up to 4GB of high-speed PC2700/2100/1600 SDRAM. The board will be available mid-November, ASUS said. µ