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The Garibaldi, or the D850GB as it is labeled for the market, is the high point of the Intel Pentium 4 desktop line of motherboards. It is based on the Intel 850 chipset featuring the Intel 82850 Memory Controller Hub (MCH), the Intel 82801BA I/O Controller Hub AHA bus, and the Intel 82802AB Firmware Hub (FWH), which communicates with the MCH for control of your system drives. The Desktop series D850GB motherboard supports Intel's NetBurst micro-architecture for dual RDRAM channels that provide an amazing 3.2 GB a second memory bus bandwidth to match the blazing speed of the Pentium 4 processor's system bus requirements. The Garibaldi supports Pentium 4 processors of 1.4 GHz and higher as the BIOS allows. The D850GB also supports system bus speeds at 400MHz for vast improvements in high bandwidth and emerging Web technologies that are becoming the leading edge in the Web industry. Sizing in at standard 12.0" X 9.6" inches and built on the 2.03 compliant ATX form factor, the D850GB will require a special case with four additional holes for the CPU mounting and 12V power supply to install and work properly. The D850GB features five local bus PCI slots, one 4X AGP slot, and a CNR slot for implementing subsystems - audio, cable modem, DSL, HPNA, v.90 modem, LAN and wireless. There are four 168-pin unbuffered RIMM sockets for a minimum of 128 MB and a maximum of 2 GB PC600 or PC800 RDRAM memory. There are also four USB connectors (two are external and one is a header) for two front or two rear USB ports that can be attached by a cable. Many people will be put off by motherboards utilizing Rambus or RDRAM because the common theme about it is that it is very expensive. But recent market changes have gotten the average price of RDRAM down to about $150 US right now for a 128 Meg chip, making RDRAM an affordable option for your desktop solution. And the benefits in multimedia applications are quite noticeable when using RDRAM over standard SDRAM with the P4 and the 850 chipset. The sound features on Intel desktop motherboards are a very nice setup and use the AC'97 Codec with SoundMax technology that supports 3D positional sound and Direct X as well as EAX and A3D features. This is a major benefit to the gamer or music enthusiast out there who doesn't want to have to purchase and additional sound card which occupies a PCI slot on the motherboard. For your BIOS and hardware monitoring, the D850GB makes use of an 4 MB Flash programmable Intel/AMI Hybrid BIOS featuring (APM) Advanced Power Management 1.2 ACPI 1.0, DMI 2.0 and multi-language support, and supports Intel's Rapid BIOS Boot which gives the user faster access times to the PC from the initial power on. It also features (STR) Suspend To RAM and (WFM) Wired For Management 2.0 compliant for system wake up when using onboard LAN or an add in PCI network interface card with remote wake up compatibility. All in all this is a solid featured and well made motherboard from the folks over at Intel, and when the software catches up to it we will see even better performance from this CPU and chipset combination. The D850GB should do well in the high end desktop marketplace due to its onboard abilities and ease of use. Another positive thing about this motherboard is its very nice three year warranty. Always a plus to the end user, and can be a life saver if something ever goes wrong with your board. And the thing you know about Intel is they will still be around unlike some fly-by-night companies out there in PC land. Let's move on to the install and testing phase of this review. Package Content I received the pre-production sample model that was only the motherboard itself and the drivers CD. The retail package will contain the manual, all the cables you will need, and the drivers CD inside of a nice clean box with whatever additional stuff they decide to include. 
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