Intel LGA 775 desktop boards revealed

WE MUST LEARN to call Intel's future Alderswood the 925X soon, and according to roadmaps seen by the INQ there's a spate of own motherboards from the chip giant ready for its launch.

The new LGA 775 socket for Prescotts starts with 3.60GHz Pentium 4s in Q2 2004, and because Intel makes motherboards as well as chipsets and microprocessors, there's plenty of these being readied for the 925X and Grantsdale launches.

Alderswood (925X) boards will include Culver City and Black Canyon. These are ATX and microATX boards, support LGA 775 chips, including Intel's sound system Azalia and its ICH6R, serial ATA, dual channel DDR2, GbEthernet LAN, 1394 Firewire, and RAID. And PCI Express.

Boards intended for the Grantsdale P chipset include Battle Lake, Cherry Creek, Comanche Creek, GLen Ridge and Sharkey. These are PCI Express boards of slightly different flavours including ICH6 and ICH6R, dual channel DDR2, and Intel's soon to be famous Azalia.

For Grantsdale G, which you'll recall is the graphics chipset flave, the codenames are Eatonville, Luxemburg, Avalon and Augsburg. Again, these will all support PCI Express, have integrated GFX, and support the all new bright and shiny LGA775 Prescotts.

In the second half, Intel projects a microBTX motherboard, the first of its kind from the chip giant. Again, this will be for the Grantsdale G chipset and will have S-ATA, Azalia and Gigabit Ethernet.

Grantsdale GV/GL chipsets will be used in the West Branch and DOwney boards, at time of writing.

So it appears that Intel is proceeding softly-softly on BTX boards for 2004 - no doubt by 2005 we'll be flooded with such beasties. µ