Shipping: November

Last month, on September 24th to be exact, Sharky Extreme reviewed the first i820 mainboard that a mainboard manufacturer considered being 100% final and hence worthy of review.

Ironically the manufacturer in this case was Intel and the i820 mainboard was their own baseline VC820 Vancouver product.

The reason this is ironic is, of course, the fact that just hours after our review was completed, Intel publicly admitted to a last minute bug popping up within their i820 mainboard's RAMBUS interface design and delayed the i820 chipset launch indefinitely.

It's been over a month now since the delay of the i820 launch date (originally September 27th) and, although the chipset still hasn't arrived on the market, it is much closer to doing so according to Sharky Extreme's sources at Intel. We've been told that the first part of November will likely see the i820 "re-launch" occur but again this information is not nailed down and not yet publicly confirmed by Intel.

The RAMBUS data corruption issue that brought things to a halt in the first place seems to be occurring when data moves from the CPU to the third RAMBUS RIMM slot and back again. We haven't been able to duplicate the error in question in our own labs so it's tough to say how difficult Intel's task in fixing the problem really is. So while we all wait for the fix to occur, we're going to bring you reviews of the third party i820 mainboards that will arrive in the market place the very day Intel allows the new chipset to launch in November.

Today's board is Taiwanese mainboard manufacturer Gigabyte's i820 entry, which deviates enough from the Intel reference i820 board design to deserve your attention.