Storming The Market: Intel D845PEBT2

The first well-equipped retail board from Intel. The quality is right; the features can still stand some improvement.

A massive cooler on the Northbridge - that's not really necessary.

The motherboards from Intel used to be found predominantly in the OEM sector. But in the retail segment? No way! But, times they are a-changing, and Intel is aggressively entering the end-user market, prowling around like a starving lion. This means that the established Taiwanese board manufacturers will have to face stiff competition straight from the chipset supplier. And the board, which goes by the cryptic name "D845PEBT2" (to be outdone only by DFI), looks pretty good indeed.

View of the ports on the Intel board.

Serial ATA pure - there's no RAID for classical IDE interfaces.

That's what Intel relies on: Silicon Image's Serial ATA chip.