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With the proliferation of
800MHz FSB processors and the wide acceptance of DDR400
memory, it's quite easy to see how Springdale and
Canterwood boards have captured a large share of the
current market. Performance-wise, both of these
chipsets provide a large jump over the very successful
i845, but with an equally large bump in the price.
Cost-conscious users who are currently content with their
i845 setup might find the cost of upgrading somewhat
prohibitive. As we all know, the upgrade cycle can
sometimes be vicious, with few components able to make the
"jump" from one setup to the next. A new board, CPU,
twin sets of RAM, etc. - it all adds up quickly.
Intel has come up with a solution that brings many of the
performance enhancements of the i865 and i875, but at a fraction of the price. The
recently
released i848P chipset comes stocked with 800MHz FSB CPU
support, DDR400, and SATA (including SATA RAID) support at
the expense of the Dual DDR channels. It should
allow those on a budget to make an upgrade without running
up a large price tag.
Our first two samples come
from Albatron, with their PX865PE Lite Pro motherboard,
and Asus' P4P800S-E. The names of each of these boards sounds similar to their Springdale versions, the
865PE Pro II and the P4P800 Deluxe. Although
somewhat misleading, this nomenclature correctly suggests
that the boards share their structure with their more
powerful cousins. Our only complaint was with Albatron's
inclusion of 865 in the title, as some users may assume
that the board is a Springdale, which it is not.
These two boards are specifically designed to fill a value
or budget niche for each company, although the roads taken
are somewhat different. Read on below for a quick
check on the i848P and then let's take a closer look at
each of these boards.
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ALBATRON PX865PE Lite Pro |
ASUS P4P800S-E |
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CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR
AN ENLARGED VIEW
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Specifications
of
the Intel i848P |
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A
stripped down Springdale |
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The schematic
above may look very similar to those of the Springdale and
Canterwood, and that's no accident. The Intel 848P
Chipset is designed in the same manner as the other two,
supporting Pentium 4 processors with Hyper-Threading
technology with front side bus speeds of 400, 533, and
800MHz. High bandwidth interfaces include AGP 8X
graphics, Intel Communication Streaming Architecture for
Gigabit Ethernet capabilities, and dual SATA ports built
into the ICH5/ICH5R Southbridge. The only major
component lacking would be the Dual-channel DDR support
that have substantially increased the memory bandwidth on
the i865 and i875. Checking over this list of
features, however, brought another chipset to mind - the
SiS 648FX. We had a chance to test a SiS 648FX board
from Gigabyte back in August and honestly weren't all that
impressed. So how will today's single-channel boards fare?
We've decided to put these two boards up against the
Gigabyte GA-8S648FX, as well as and i865, the Abit IS7-G,
to find out...
Albatron's PX865PE
Lite Pro up close
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