Intel‘s Broadwater family of chipsets includes e.g. G965, P965, Q965 and Q963. These chipsets are intended for Intel’s new Core architecture and have already started to appear on the market, some of them at least (G965 Express). Now Intel has made a late change to the memory controller’s specifications of the Broadwater family; It has removed the support for 1Gbit DDR2-800 DIMMs, which mean that motherboards with these chipsets can only be equipped with 1GB memory modules if you want to run DDR2-800. Those who wants to use 1Gbit circuits, in short 2GB modules, will have to move down to 533MHz or 667MHz. Even if it hasn’t announced why it has skipped the support for memory modules with 16 1Gbit circuits, it is most likely because of stability.
Since 2GB memory modules are still very few and cost a lot this is not a great loss as of today. But those who are thinking of using their Broadwater motherboard for some time this could prove to be a problem.
