Now that it is legal to use Pentium 4-supporting chipsets from VIA Technologies, a lot of mainboard makers may choose appropriate solutions from Taipei, Taiwan-based logic-designer because of competitive pricing and a number of advanced features. The Inquirer reports that ABIT will introduce its VI7 on VIA PT800 early in the third quarter, it means, next month.

ABIT’s VIA PT800-based VI7 will support Intel Socket 478 processors with 400, 533 and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus. It will provide single-channel PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory support, AGP 8x and so on. Thanks to VIA VT8237 I/O controller, VI7 will be able to offer us Serial ATA-150 RAID, 8 USB 2.0 ports, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, SPDIF-out and other necessary capabilities.

The mainboard should be an affordable one, though, I do not think it will outperform current i865PE or i875P-based solutions. To tell you the truth, all those single-channel 800MHz QPB-supporting products are better suitable for more or less advanced office PCs, but not for workstation or gaming machines.