PC1066 has always been official. Intel just hadn't personally validated it for the 850. That in no way stopped other motherboard manufacturers from validating it themselves though.
The cheap manus just trust Intel and don't validate anything for themselves, so they weren't offering official PC1066 support because it would cost them time and money to validate on their own. Now that Intel has validated PC1066, these cheap manus can just go along with trusting Intel.
The quality manus though either run their own seperate validation anyway, or such as in this case were willing to run their own seperate validation because Intel hadn't yet. They were offering official PC1066 support from the beginning of the 850E. For them, nothing has changed because they weren't hindered by Intel's lack of validation in the first place.
After all, to the end-user, Intel validation doesn't mean crap unless it's an actual Intel motherboard. You do RMAs to the reseller and you do factory warantees to the manufacturer (such as Asus), so as long as the manu officially supported it, it never mattered if Intel did or didn't.
All Intel's official validation means is that now you have to worry about faulty cheap-arsed 850 mobos from manus too stingy to do their own validation.
<pre><A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/comic/186.htm" target="_new"><font color=red>It's all relative...</font color=red></A></pre><p>