VIA's P4X266: The Pentium 4 gets DDR

The Board and its competitors

VIA provided us with a reference board based on the P4X266 chipset for use in this review.  The reference board was very reliable during our tests and crashed only once during the days of non-stop testing.  Unfortunately the reference board would not work with our unlocked engineering sample Pentium 4 processors so we were forced to use the only locked CPU we had in the lab: a Pentium 4 1.5GHz processor.  This won't affect you but we felt it was worth explaining why we tested with a Pentium 4 1.5GHz CPU instead of the current P4 speed champ, the Pentium 4 1.8GHz.

Click to Enlarge

We compared the board to MSI’s 850Pro2 which was one of the first 4-layer i850 motherboards to hit the streets.

Finally, we managed to get our hands on an ABIT BL7-RAD through a distributor contact of ours.  The BL7-RAID uses Intel’s i845 chipset (aka Brookdale) which is a Pentium 4 chipset with PC133 SDRAM support. 

Click to Enlarge

In spite of the fact that Intel’s official i845 launch is a month away, you will be able to purchase boards well before then.  There are some floating in the channel already and you can expect that number to increase in these next couple of weeks.