Motherboards with i845 Chipsets

manplusdog writes: "Dan reviews a couple of i845 motherboards here and lets just say he doesn't hold back! "Mainboards For The Stupid" is the verdict. I have no affiliation with Dan or his site (aside from being Australian) but found the review..... entertaining. Cheers"

Comments

Re:Yawn..

[Arker]

Why would any self respecting slashdot reader not opt for a DDR Athlon??

Well there's a couple reasons I can think of. First off you might be looking to upgrade an Intel board you got for free *cough* but in that case you wouldn't be buying one of these motherboards. :)

The second reason would be thermal protection. Intel build a little thermometre into their chips, along with some circuitry that'll turn the sucker off in case the temperature goes way over where it should be. Which isn't such a huge thing, if you use proper cooling it shouldn't matter, but in some cases it's probably worth thinking about.

If you do get an Athlon, be sure and cool it properly. They'll keep processing till they burst into flames... :)

Re: Athlon Cooling

[Inthewire]

Yeah? Wrong, unless you use some pretty aggressive settings. The time it takes software to detect the problem is 5 times longer than it takes an Athlon to self destruct.
Tom's reported a rise of a few hundred degrees per second...no software solution will catch it, unless you've found or written one in the last three days.
That said, I still choose AMD over Intel...I know how to keep the cooler locked on and finctioning.

Tom's Hardware has a review too

[Anonymous DWord]

Here: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q3/010702 /index.html

The question now is, who will be interested in it? It is true that it will make Pentium 4 much more affordable due to its PC133 SDRAM support, but its lackluster memory performance impacts Pentium 4 so badly, that it makes AMD's Athlon an even more attractive solution than it already is. I personally would consider everyone as close to crazy if he should choose Pentium 4 plus i845 and PC133 SDRAM.

Trivia

[Daniel Rutter]

Howdy. Page mine. Server looks fine to me. Site hosted in USA, not here in Australia. So if you can't see it, not my fault. And I can get my mail just fine, thanks :-).

On a more interesting note, I put that review up on the 30th of August, which was while motherboard manufacturers were still getting busted for even saying that they'd shipped i845 boards, because the chipset hadn't officially been launched yet.

But here in Australia, for some reason, the boards were already being sold retail. I just grabbed those two from m'verygoodfriends at Aus PC Market.

I should probably update the review; I bet Abit and Asus have product pages for those boards, now :-).

Re:Athlon Cooling

[crimoid]

Given that the P4 will just throttle back to cool off (thereby staying up and operational with no data loss) rather than requiring a motherboard manufacturer to build in extra functionality to only _shut_down_ the system IMHO it seems that having the processor control this function is the ideal solution.

Re:The Pentium 4 is worth the extra price.

[Watts]

I personally have had no reliability issues with Athlon systems, nor have any of my associates (with the exception of one faulty motherboard). While this personal point isn't going to prove anything for overall reliability worldwide, it makes me think when I see half a dozen systems running night and day in constant use with no crashes, freezing, or hardware failure.

Let's address your issues:

• Rambus memory: I'm not against Rambus. Maybe on an intellectual-property standpoint, or on a corporate standpoint, but they make some good memory. However, Intel has done an amazingly mediocre job of taking advantage of such memory in their chipset offerings. They obviously aren't going to get the performance gains that have been seen in game consoles because they don't have a unified memory architecture, but the fact remains that Intel engineers have had difficulty pulling the possible performance out of Rambus memory.
• SSE Support: As you've stated, SSE2 code does some really nice tricks. For "heavy data processing algorithms" it doesn't really have any competitors in the x86 world, yet. However, this is really limitjng the scope of applications, as not every program is going to be able to take advantage of this functionality. In fact, most won't. Overall, SSE2 is nice but takes some attention to optimize for. Whether a lot of mass usage programs will take advantage of it is yet to be seen. I'm not going to say anything too negative about it, because it is something that can be used well.
• Commitment to open source: Amazingly poor naming schemes aside, I don't believe AMD has any less of a commitment to open source than Intel does. I have a friend who was employed at AMD over a year ago who was paid to optimize software like glibc and gcc to take advantage of the Athlon processor. AMD's x86-64 has public specs and x86-64.org is hosted by AMD to showcase ports of open source projects to this new processor.

The Pentium 4 is a useful platform, but there are viable alternatives as well. Just because one piece of technology is good does not mean that others are bad. I personally would gladly use any stable, well-performing system that fits the given task.