INTEL's PENTIUM 4 HAS SPENT its life until now mated exclusively to Rambus DRAM on Intel's 850 chipset. That fact hasn't particularly harmed its performance; we recently crowned the 2GHz version of the P4 the new king of x86 performance. The P4's use of RDRAM, however, has almost certainly harmed its market acceptance.

As a company, Rambus hasn't exactly endeared itself to the PC industry in the past few years. Legal patent and licensing wrangling, high RDRAM prices, and technical glitches have made Rambus infamous. Finally, after sticking with its memory partner for quite a while, Intel saw fit to begin distancing itself from Rambus late last year.

The 845 chipset, released today, is a first step. This flavor of the 845 supports good ol' PC133 SDRAM. It's not the fastest memory around, but it's dirt cheap, which is important if the Pentium 4 is to replace the Pentium III in the high-volume corporate market. A version of the 845 chipset capable of using faster DDR SDRAM is in the works, but Intel says it won't arrive until after the first of the year.

Meanwhile, feisty chipset manufacturer VIA has been selling Pentium III and Athlon chipsets with DDR support for some time now. Soon, Pentium 4 motherboards based on VIA's Pentium 4 chipset will start hitting the shelves—complete with support for DDR SDRAM. Read on to see how these two new SDRAM chipsets match up with Intel's RDRAM-driven 850.