Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

The Contenders

When the i845 launched, motherboard manufacturers had their boards ready long before the official release date. We were also told that their DDR solutions were just as ready; they were simply waiting for Intel to give them the heads up. When push came to shove however, it was clear that this wasn't the case.

While the 845 DDR launch is still better than any other non-Intel chipset launch, it's definitely not as strong as the debut of the PC133 platforms in September. There were a handful of motherboard manufacturers that had their final samples done at Comdex, but the vast majority of them got their boards to us within the past week alone. A few manufacturers weren't even ready for this roundup including ASUS and Shuttle among others who we all hope to include in a later update.

In spite of that, we still managed to gather a total of 12 boards for this roundup. All of the boards are Socket-478 solutions, further indicating the dead-end path that Socket-423 turned out to be. In alphabetical order, the motherboards we're comparing are:

ABIT BD7-RAID
AOpen AX4B Pro
Chaintech 9BJD0
DFI NB70-SC
ECS P4IBAD
FIC VC15
Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR (GA-8IRXP)
Intel D845BG
Luckystar P4A845D
MSI 845 Ultra
Soltek SL-85DR-C
Soyo P4I Fire Dragon

Now it's on to the boards…