Pentium 4 3GHz w/ 800MHz System Bus and Intel's Canterwood

Intel's Pentium 4 3GHz With 800MHz System Bus
And The i875P "Canterwood" Chipset
More bandwidth and leading edge desktop technology for the P4

By, Dave Altavilla
and Chris Angelini
April 14, 2003
 

 
Intel has been making great strides toward engineering and building motherboards based on their chipsets, that are geared toward the enthusiast or end user.  The two main features we've been waiting for, that are brought forth with Canterwood, are Dual Channel DDR400 support and AGP8X.  However, there's a lot more to the story, with the Intel's new "ICH5" Southbridge that is also now available as of this launch.

Specifications and Features Of The D875PBZ i875P Based Motherboard Dual DDR400, AGP8X, SATA RAID - We're feeling warm and fuzzy here.

Interestingly enough, the board that Intel sent for testing, did not have on board sound available.  This is an option that Intel feels many enthusiasts may or may not be interested in, due to the fact that many use PCI sound cards.  However, obviously System Integrators will most likely be opting for this feature.  Other than that, this board offers the most leading edge technology available in PC Motherboards today.

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As a pre-requisite, this board, as well as others based on the i857P Canterwood and follow-on Springdale chipsets, has the capability to operate with a 200MHz Quad Data Rate/800MHz System Bus.  In addition, to support this higher bandwidth the move to Dual Channel DDR400 was made.  Again AGP8X is there for the Gamers and Pro Engineer types alike but what is truly indicative that Intel is turning an ear to the enthusiast, is what's under the hood of the new Intel ICH5 Southbridge.  Not only does this chipset and motherboard support Serial ATA but you also have the ability to stripe a RAID 0 array with two drives, for a great performance boost.  More on this later.

Then of course we were very pleased to see a total of 6 USB jacks on the back header bracket and legacy PATA ATA100 channels.  Finally, there was a massive heatsink on the Northbridge chip, which was permanently riveted to the board somehow.  As a result, we're not able to give you with up close and personal shots of our friend Canterwood in its habitat.

The D875PBZ BIOS Looking more user friendly every day

Upon installation and boot-up, we were greeted with a highly configurable BIOS, a kin to the type of interfaces we've seen on many other 3rd party enthusiasts boards.  With the D875PBZ, Intel is no longer picking memory clock speeds and timings for you, nor are they even holding you to the stock speed of your processor.

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Overclocking with an Intel board; we never thought we would see the day.  Intel not only allows you to aggressively set your memory timings at 266, 333 or 400MHz but they allow you to enable "Burn-In" mode with respect to your CPU.  Burn-in mode  allows the user to dial in up to a 4% increase in clock speed, for "validation and testing" purposes only.  You can call it what you like...  We call it overclocking and overclocking is goodness.

The WinXP device manager shows us a few new goodies, including Intel's 82801ER SATA RAID Controller.  Look out Silicon Image, Highpoint and Promise, your desktop business just got a little bite taken out of it, or was that a big bite?  Time will tell.

HotHardware's Test Systems Bleeding edge

P4 3GHz CPUID and Chipset ID
 
 

In terms of the test setup for this showcase, we had to work with a bunch of different gear, in order to level the playing fields.  First, we should point out that the Granite Bay motherboard we chose to work with for the 2.8GHz and 3.06GHz Pentium 4 testing, was the impressive Asus P4G8X.  Since this board doesn't come equipped with Intel's new ICH5, we utilized a Silicon Image SATA PCI Controller card,  for use with our Seagate Barracuda V SATA drives.  Although, the P4G8X does have an on board Silicon Image chip, the nForce2 motherboard we used did not have this, so we used the same PCI SATA card here as well.  The Canterwood and P4 3G-800 testing was done with the same Seagate SATA drive but driven from the new ICH5 SATA controller on the Intel motherboard's Southbridge.  All other components and configurations were identical, with the obvious exception of chipset drivers.  All systems were setup on an NTFS partition, with Windows visual enhancements set to "best performance" and system restore and automatic updates were turned off.

Benchmarks anyone?