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Without making any announcements to the general public, Intel Corp. added its i915GL and i915PL chipsets into lineup of core-logic offerings recently, confirming earlier reports about i915-series chipsets with cut-down specifications, particularly without DDR2 memory support.
Intel’s i915PL and i915GL chipsets support dual-channel PC3200 (400MHz) memory only, instead of supporting both DDR and DDR2 which is a standard for the i915P and i915G chipsets, but still boast with support for LGA775 processors and PCI Express interconnection. In contrast to usual i915-series chipsets, the i915PL and i915GL support only 2GB of memory, not 4GB of RAM.
Intel’s latest family of core-logic sets, such as i915G and i915P, originally brought dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM memory, PCI Express x16 and x1 lanes for next-generation add-in cards, the industry’s first integrated graphics core with DirectX 9.0 support – Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (i915G only), 4 Serial ATA-150 ports with RAID support, High-Definition 7.1 Audio as well as some other important capabilities. Due to relatively high DDR2 memory pricing, in order to allow its customers to make their new systems more affordable, Intel’s i915G and i915P memory controllers also supported dual-channel DDR memory, which is not as expensive as DDR2. Still, Intel charged its partners certain extra sums of money per every chipset for DDR2 support.
The list prices of the i915PL and i915GL products were originally reported to be about 30% lower compared to the pricing of the i915P and i915G products. The assumption meant that the 915GL might cost around $27, while the 915PL might cost around $23, compared to $33 and $38 for i915P and i915G respectively, in the second half of January, 2005.
The world’s largest mainboard maker ASUSTeK Computer was first to start shipments of its P5GPL mainboard powered by i915PL core-logic. The platform supports Intel Pentium 4 or Celeron D processors in LGA775 packaging with 800MHz or 533MHz processor system bus, 4 DIMMs for DDR memory, PCI Express x16 slot for graphics cards, two PCI Express x1 slots for add-in cards, 3 PCI slots, built-in Gigabit Ethernet, 7.1 high definition audio as well as other caps, such as USB 2.0. Akiba PC Hotline reports that the P5GPL costs approximately $132.
