April 1998 saw two simultaneous chipset releases by Intel for its growing P6 line of processors. The first of these was the high end, 100 MHz bus i440BX chipset which was designed to support Intel's then high end Pentium II processors. The second chipset released was the i440EX (which we shall refer to as just EX) which was designed as budget chipset to support Intel's then new Celeron processor.

Unlike the BX, the EX chipset is essentially a cut down version of the highly sucessful LX chipset. Designed for the budget PC market, the EX was never meant to be a high end solution, but it did have a place in Intel's overall chipset strategy until the introduction of the budget ZX chipset in 1999.

Intel i440EX, what does it do?

Like its close relation the LX chipset, the EX fetures many of its advanced features, such as AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port), Ultra DMA 33 support, PCI 2.1 and USB support. Where Intel achieved its cost savings for the EX were in downgrading some of its other features such as support for only 256 Mb RAM, deletion of support for ECC and Parity RAM and only support for 2 DIMM sockets of 4 SIMM sockets. Also as the EX chipset was designed for budget systems there was no need for support for SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) as was found in the LX chipset.

Processor support from the EX chipset is the same as that for the LX chipset with the Pentium II up to 333 MHz and Celeron up to 433 MHz being supported by boards based on the chipset. The EX supports a bus speed of 66 MHz meaning that it cannot run 100 MHz bus Pentium II and Pentium III processors.

Many boards based around the EX are in the ATX form factor with a number also produced in the micro ATX form factor which was well suited to budget systems. Acceptance of the EX chipset was not widespread amongst many manufacturers and so there is not a wide range of boards which can be found based upon the chipset.

Production of the EX chipset has now ceased.

EX in use.