VIA P4M266 Mainboard from ASUS

by Anton Shilov
08/26/2003 | 03:45 PM

VIA Technologies is definitely back on its track with its chipsets being adopted by various mainboard makers, including the biggest one, ASUSTeK. The company today announced that its P4V533-MX build using VIA P4M266 chipset designed for very low-cost systems.

The new product will only work with processors at 400 or 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus and will obviously not show us new performance highs, but, on the other hand, the P4V533-MX allows to build inexpensive systems with integrated graphics, audio and Ethernet based on a Celeron processor at up to 2.60GHz. Besides, adoption of the P4M266 means that VIA and ASUS start to work on Intel Pentium 4 mainboards again what is very positive for the whole market and especially for VIA Technologies.

Take a look on specifications of the mainboard:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4/Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with up to 3.06GHz clock-speed and above;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• VIA P4M266 chipset, including VIA VT8235 I/O controller;
• 2 DIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC2100 or PC2700 DDR SDRAM memory;
• 3 PCI and 1 AGP 4x slot;
• Integrated VIA ProSavage8 graphics core;
• 2-channel ATA-33/66/100/133 integrated controller;
• 6 USB 2.0 ports;
• 10/100Mb/s Ethernet adapter;
• 6-channel AC’97 audio solution;
• mATX Form Factor.

Pricing and availability of the newcomer are not disclosed at this time, but I expect the P4V533-MX product to be available immediately.