Large OEM's and computer retailers hailed the original i845 chipset as a savor to the Pentium 4. Finally, a chipset that allowed SDRAM compatibility and broke the shackles of expensive RDRAM. Little did they know that pairing a Pentium 4 with SDRAM would severely hamper the performance as much as 30%!

Now with P4 DDR chipsets coming from every corner, from Intel's own i845-D to SiS's 645 and VIA's unlicensed P4X266, users no longer have to put up with lousy performance to save some money. Today we'll be looking at DFI's NB70-SC motherboard based on the i845-D chipset. With the rather plain brown PCB, the NB70-SC looks quite drab in the face of the red and black coloured boards we have been seeing so much of these days.