Introduction

One chipset, two boards

When we think of roundups, we think of an article that takes a look at many different products that exists the same category. In that case, a two-motherboard roundup would somewhat be an oxymoron. Even before talking about anything remotely technical, the size of this comparison is a serious indication of how low key P4X266 based boards are on the market. You’ll likely have a difficult time finding a P4X266 motherboard, and an even tougher time finding a board from your favorite motherboard manufacturer such as Abit, Asus, Giga-byte, Leadtek (yes, they make motherboards now), MSI and Supermicro.

If you’re the least bit familiar with Intel, you’ll know that it almost always coordinates technology releases with its partners. Intel will always want to release its version of a certain technology, before allowing others to follow. For example, the i845 chipset is the first SDR chipset for the Pentium 4. If other chipset manufacturers want to make their own P4 SDR chipset, they can do that, but they must announce and release after Intel. Going ahead of Intel at its own game can bring serious and sometimes deadly (in a business sense anyway) consequences. This is the fate that met the P4X266 chipset from VIA.

Follow the leader

Intel’s plans were to first release i845 SDR, which it did with good success mainly in the professional market. The primary reason for bringing out a P4 platform that is a heavy underperformer was to encourage customers to move from Pentium 3 or competing Athlon systems to P4 systems. Once it determines that enough users are using P4 processors, Intel will deploy the i845 DDR chipset. The new chipset is identical to current the i845 in virtually every manner except that it supports DDR RAM while the current i845 is limited to SDR RAM.

Currently, there’s only a handful of motherboard companies producing products based on VIA’s P4X266 chipset. Most large motherboard companies with tight relationships with Intel have retreated from going the P4X266 route and instead have made boards based on Intel’s i845 chipset. Smaller companies like ECS, Shuttle and Tyan went ahead and produced P4X266 motherboard regardless of what Intel has said simply because their market share is not significantly large enough for Intel to care. If for example Intel wanted to stop a company like Shuttle from producing P4X266 boards, its P4X266 products would make up for less than 1% of the world’s P4 chipsets – hardly a threat to Intel, even by the closest definition.

In the light of that, today we’re looking at offerings from Shuttle and Tyan, both very competitive products and both now available in the market.