Soltek is one of the companies that decided to offer a transitional motherboard. The SL-865PRO-775 will be affordable, fast and ready for future Intel processors.

Some of the most interesting transitional products will be motherboards that combine the 865/875 chipset with the new LGA 775 socket. These are targeted at the many users don't want to spend money on a PCI Express graphics card and DDR2 memory as they won't get more performance at this point - and anyway, they may have spent big bucks already on DDR400 DIMMs and a fast AGP board. DFI even decided to use the 875P chipset for a new product that is called LANParty 875P-T. We can expect to see many interesting hybrids and crossbreeds over the next couple of weeks.

Better Fan Speed Control, Finally

Intel also added a 4-pin fan connector standard to the new platform. It remains fully compatible with the common 3-pin version. Once again, nobody was able to tell us its name.

All the motherboards we received so far were perfectly able to control the fan speed, and they went as far as completely stopping the fan at the temperature we specified. After looking at approximately a dozen motherboards, we can say that substantial progress has been made here.