As far as I learnt from Soltek’s web-site, VIA Technologies will soon offer an improved version of its P4X400 chipset. The new revision should definitely incorporate more efficient and stable memory controller and, possibly, some other performance and stability improvements.

When VIA released the P4X400 earlier this year, the industry observers and analysts, including ourselves (have a look at this article), told that the mainboards worked slowly, sometimes were not stable and so on. In fact, the original P4X400 was just an updated revision of the not very famous P4X333, as a result, the company decided to “forget” about the latter and removed all the mentions about this core-logic from its web-site. At first, VIA declared DDR400 support for the P4X400, but after it was revealed that DDR400 can be slow or unstable, VIA offered mainboard manufacturers to decide whether to declare DDR400 support or not.

According to Soltek, the mainboard makers will soon release its SL-85ERV2/SL-85ERV2-L, devices that will be based on P4X400 CE version. The stepping of the original P4X400 was CD, so, the new revision can be considered as “P4X400A” or something like that.

Here are the specs of the SL-85ERV2/SL-85ERV2-L:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB;
• VIA P4X400 CE chipset with VT8235 I/O controller;
• 3 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2100/PC2700 DDR SDRAM memory; Certain DDR400 modules are also supported;
• 6 PCI slots and 1 AGP 8x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-133/100/66/33 integrated controller;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• 10/100Mbit/s Ethernet adapter for the SL-85ERV2-L;
• 6-channel AC’97 audio solution;
• A number of additional functions, including technologies like SmartDoc, Anti-burning Shield and RedStorm Overclocking;
• Overclocking functions;
• ATX Form Factor.

There are no differences in PCB design of the novelty, hence, I believe that VIA P4X400 (CD) and VIA P4X400 (CE) are pin-to-pin compatible (they really should, frankly speaking). There is no word about pricing and availability. Please note: VIA has not announced any new revisions of their P4X400 core-logic.