Intel leans on ATI for cheap motherboards

. We've told you for quite some time that Intel is going to go easy on entry level motherboards and that ATI will be the one to jump in with a "Longhorn Vista" ready Radeon Xpress motherboard. Even Intel started to fume when we first revealed this.

As we predicted before and as we now can read from Intel's own document, Chipzilla announced the D101GGC desktop motherboard and have its specifications up on its site. This mATX motherboard supports Pentium CPUs socket 775 with one and two MB of cache Celeron D are supported but we haven't found Pentium D dual core CPUs listed. The board is based on ATI's RC410 IGP chipset and is using ATI IXP 450 Southbridge and 4 Mbit Firewire hub.

You can plug two times DDR memory inside of the board and the board has PCIe 16X graphic slot, one PCIe 1X and two PCI slots. Intel offers 10/ 100 Realtek LAN card on board as well as Realtek ALC861 audio codec. The board supports eight USB 2.0, serial and parallel port, four SATA ports with Raid support, one IDE channel for IDE drives, floppy, keyboard and mouse connector.

Looks very much like an OEM board to me and ATI chipset's division is probably delirious as this is the first time in recent history that Intel has used third party chipsets for its own motherboards. Boards are expected to be available and I believe you can already order them as we write.

We do wonder about RC410 graphic capabilities, but we've already reported that this chipset features a X300SE like graphic chip with two pipelines inside. µ

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