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Intel's New Pentium 4 Chipsets Reviewed
RainDog writes "Intel has released its 845PE and GE chipsets for the Pentium 4 processor, and reviews are hitting the web. The new chipsets officially support DDR333, but are stuck with AGP 4X and ATA/100 support. What's most interesting about these new chipsets is that they're faster than VIA and SiS' latest Pentium 4 offerings, both of which support faster AGP 8X and ATA/133 graphics and disk interfaces. As if that weren't enough, Intel's new "Blue Mountain" motherboard comes on a black PCB with all sorts of multimedia ports and memory timing options. Not bad for the traditionally conservative Intel."
Again, the most prominent, first-mentioned, feature of the Intel reference motherboard is its... Black Color.
Consider that every time new hardware comes out, Linux (and the GNU Source process in general) has to go through a period of reverse engineering, documentation "freeing", alpha testing, beta testing, etc. Add to that the fact that Linux kernels come out less often than wars in the Persian Gulf and we could be looking at several years before True Geeks can take full advantage of the power of these Intel G4's.
Wow. I eagerly await a candy-striped peppermint-flavored board, which surely will give better performance and more bang for the buck.
anyone know of any retailer selling these bundled with transparent case mods ?!
time is a funny concept
The reviewer loses all credibility with comments like
(OK, I admit it: I made up the part about the Firewire ports. But you get the idea.)
all the way in the next paragraph after including Firewire was a feature.
Also is this a review or an advertisment?
Intel keeps coming with promises of the Best chipset ever, nothing will EVER Be better, then the week after, poof, a new one with 80x the power.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
why do prople put so much stock in to intel? all the good IT/computer people AMD is the way to go. i mean commom if intel wants to move ahead in the world, they have to support the newest features, like ATA/166,and AGP 8X. Take AMD for axample, even tho the clock speed on the AMD XP chips are slower it's features make up for it. like 3DNOW!, 3DNOW! +, SSE, SSE extended, MMX, MMX +, and MMX extended this is the same seniro with ATI Vs. Nvidia again all the graphic people know ATI is better, Nvidia knows what the public wants to here, so they make the fastes clock speed. but ATi has much better features, like smoothvision, and truform.
845PE, GE, DDR333, AGP 8X, ATA/133, "Blue Mountain", black PCB (finally, someone for black kids to look up to...).
Can someone cut through this heap of jargon and marketroid buzzwordsmithy and tell me how in the name of RMS this affects me, the Linux power user? Does it bother anyone that in three months we'll be reading an identical story about 928BE, TL, MOK444, LBJ 9X, PCP/420, "Grassy Knoll", and yellow LSD? When does it end, and why do we care?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I dont know whether this chipset is supported by linux, but if it uses the same southbridge as the 845E (ICH4) it might be.
If you have trouble getting your 845E/ICH4 to work in ide-dma mode (PCI: Device 00:1f.1 not available because of resource collisions) try linux-2.4.19-ac4, it works for me.
http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html
"I drank what?" - Socrates
You make it sound as if making more than one product is dubious, and that improving those products is also dubious. You could compare and contrast a load of companys that fit the same mold.
Laptop Reviews
You do not equate to we.
We are not all linux power users. Some are windows users, some are solaris users, some are casual linux users. Thats what makes the world great. Diversity.
This is news for nerds, stuff that matters. Not all nerds are the same. Stuff that matters to me may not matter to you, stuff that matters to you may not matter to me.
If you don't like it don't read the articles you don't want to. Please don't whine about them. Plenty of articles that will appeal to you will come.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
... or don't we see chipset manufacturers avoiding the hard problems completely? I realize that cost is an issue, but for the most part, we're talking about high-performance workstation and server boards, which cost $500+ or more.
The biggest issues these days are:
Unfortunately, there seems to be little innovation going on in chipsets these days. The high end looks very, very, very depressingly identical to the cheap consumer crap. WTF folks?
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
When the first thing a motherboard review cites is how great it looks, you know we've finally crossed the threshold where extra speed is irrelevent. It's time to back off investment in hardware and put that money into developers. The computers are fast enough; now we need software that is more stable, more secure, and most usable.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
"...but are stuck with AGP 4X and ATA/100 support." Stuck with? AGP 8x and ATA/133 are very marginal improvements in most situations. Stuck with would have been having AGP 8x, ATA/133, and DDR266.
XeoMage
Intel is playing catch up and releasing some new boards with all the bells and whistles that the other guys have been releasing for some time now.
However, Intel does release stable products(some have been flawed, i820) And in an enteprise a board with an an Intel chipset is usually the best way to go.
But in the end who cares? As long as it works fine. As long as it is pretty quick, stable, and does as promised I am a pretty happy camper.
Got other stuff to worry about than p4's with 333 ddr. DDR aint to cheap anyway. I got a gig of it in my athlon box. But I coulda got 4 gigs of SDR ram for the same cost and tricked out a mean little server with it.
Jeez this aint news.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Intel's new "Blue Mountain" motherboard comes on a black PCB
How long until someone makes a white PCB? With all the casemods, etc., I'm sure the modders would love a mobo that would colour itself to whatever lighting they have installed/turned on...
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
If it doesn't have Serial ATA on the board, it isn't a new product. I can't be the only one holding off on their next major upgrade until they can get Serial ATA on a motherboard with an Intel chipset.
So come on Intel, put Serial ATA on the board and you've got a sure sale. No more of this parallel ATA crap. While you're at it, get rid of the serial and parallel ports.
...but are stuck with AGP 4X and ATA/100 support.
Say what? AGP 8X is a marketing gimmick, at least as the moment, and no hard drive can transfer faster than even ATA66. To top it all off, Intel is known for very high quality chipsets, unlike their Taiwanese competitors. You can't have your cake and eat it too, guys. Jeez.
Obviously, as any physics geeek knows, these new BLACK motherboards will radiate infrared heat faster, thus meaning cooler computing.
ATA/133 support is not important for performance. No one or two disk drives can saturate the bus, but... ATA/133 is currently the _only_ way to connect HDD greater than 137GB to you system and be able to use the extra space. IBM is @ 180, WD is @ 200, and Maxtor should be shipping their 320 any day now. For my servers at work and my media storage at home, 4x120 is not enough. Sure, I could use the provided PCI ATA/133 card, but... that's lame.
Anandtech has a very good review at http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1723. It compares and contrasts many motherboards with the chipsets on them, comparing features, etc, and it also has some very good benchmarking information. It also supports hyperthreading, which looks like it will be a very promising technology. It also points out some problems with some of these new motherboards. This chipset looks like it can offer great potential, for both the average home user, and the typical overclocker, especially the Albatron PX845PEV Pro, which has a interface that is similar to Softmenu 3. The ASUS P4PE also has great potential for overclocking, yet it doesnt look like it's as tough as the Albatron. Their technical support is also not as good. If it is USB that you are looking for though, the Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra definately offers the most functionality (10 Ports, wow!). In all, this review is quite long, with 25 pages of content, which offers more information than the mentioned review.
Why on earth would I give up my stable, Intel mother board/processor combinations? Every time I have tried to get an AMD machine to work correctly it fails. I follow all of AMD's specs and instructions and the machine still fails. Right now I am fighting with an Asus a7v333/1800xp system that refuses to run windows xp at all. I am using an asus geforce 4 video card, Kingston memory, and a single WD hard drive. And it will not run xp worth a sh*t. But I just this am put together a new asus p4b533/p4 2.6 GHz, and it is up and loaded, with all of the xp updates a little more then 2 hours from out of the box. If AMD wants me to buy their sh*t, they need to make it work on the first try. I will continue to pay more for reliability, and still have one of the fastest machines out there. I will never buy an AMD system again. This is from just one IT business owner/computer guy.
its been YEARS since I bought an intel cpu.
since the days of the k7, its been the price/performance winner for me and all the systems I build for myself and friends.
the cpu prices are absurd for intel. I don't even CONSIDER intel anymore. not even the tiniest thought.
until their cpu prices are about even with amd, their chipsets mean nothing to me.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I don't see any indication from the article whether the Intel motherboard that uses the i845ge also provides Serial ATA. Also, I would be interested in knowing how this Silicon Image chip is attached. For example, if it is only connected by a 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, then it will only be able to transfer data across the bus at 133 megabytes per second. No single disk drive goes that fast, but if it has a bunch of Serial ATA ports, it might be an issue. I saw some posting on slashdot that said that most recent chipsets do not physically attach their IDE interfaces through the PCI bus, but rather do something faster even though the devices logically look to the CPU like they are on the PCI bus.
It's true ... fast yes, but the A7V333 really and truly suxxx -- hot & flakey -- I've got a sys like yours (XP2100+) to prove it. My new *nix-box again similar to yours will run the P4s333/P4-2.0 and I expect no problemos, even with DDR333.
I'll give you one hint, and one hint only.
*Asus a7v333*
VIA chipsets suck, please, don't blame AMD for via's incompetance (or your poor choice of mainboard)
You could get that kind of performance but you would need special memory for your main CPU, and it would have to be installed in special banks in special quanitys. Remember that RDRAM has to be installed, 2 at a time? at the same size?
It would be much more expensive for this ram and the motherboard. Most people's motherboards cost 1/5 what a new high end video card costs. Also, those high end video cards have a FIXED amount of ram which helps them a lot.
Building a system that is expandable and over the top fast is not cheap.
Serial ATA
Gigabit Lan
IEEE1394 (FireWire)
RAID
Multiple Overclocking features.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I have fought with AMD processors on both VIA and SIS chip based motherboards. And they both suck. Every Intel board I have had has worked with out a problem, to include non-Intel based boards, such as my SIS based Asus, and my VIA based Asus. The AMD chipsets I think are flaky by default.
By the way, Aten sells USB serial adapters for $19.
That page also has a link to Centrix which, at $9 shipping per order, is remaindering USB serial adapters for $4 and USB parallel adapters for $2. I would not argue that that repesents an equilibrium price though.
the SiS 735 is a perfectly solid little chipset, the problem lies elsewhere.
Either
1) you got a half-D-O-A mainboard in the first place
2) your PSU/ram were subpar
3) the mains power to your house is subpar (this ties to the PSU being subpar)
On the other hand, the most troublesome board I've EVER owned was an Abit SH6 (i815E chipset).
Abit are certainly off my list.
(btw, which SiS chipset board was it you had problems with?)
If you want to connect a bunch of drives on a common fast serial connection, there is already a plethora of options, all of which basically serialize SCSI commands: FireWire, Universal Serial Bus 2.0, Fibre Channel, Serial SCSI Architecture (SSA), InfiniBand, and iSCSI.
I don't think that the board is bad because, it has been running win2k for over 4 days now with out a problem, no lock up, no on its own reboots. I don't think the memory is bad, First of all it is Kingston pc 2100 DDR, next it ran in my P4 setup for a year with out any problems ( was moved down when upgraded to pc 2700 ddr) Power, I don't think their is a power problem, because I use an old line cleaner/conditioner from APC (left over from an old work upgrade) that dumps in to an APC Smart-UPS 1000VA USB, for an additional power cleaner and power lost back up system. I have had problems with every AMD XP mother board I have had to work on, be it a Sis or a VIA chipset. I have never with one exception had any problems with Intel boards being bad. The bad board was an 820 base, and it was recalled, and replaced by Intel. That works for ME!
First the comments. "It has firewire... Oh, I was just kidding. Or was I kidding about the midget"
I saw the apparent Firewire port on the motherboard and got very confused.
His chipset comparison summary page shows no Firewire on any of the mobos except for the SiS one though.
So what's that port?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Cheap, crappy PSUs abound in this industry.
My family has two Athlon systems. Both are rock solid and work wonderfully.
I can't remember what the exact config is of my dad's Athlon, but mine is a 1.1 GHz Tbird in a Epox EP-8KHA motherboard. (VIA KT266). Despite running cheap-ass RAM it's quite stable. (I did have to back the memory timings off a little bit to accomodate aforementioned cheap RAM.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Yea so what if intels got a new chipset. look at all the great ones for amd. amd's 2800+ is coming out soon and i have money it will run faster than intels 2.8. go with amd, most amd boards have ddr 400 and agp 8x (exgigabyte 7vax-p) this board also has 1394.
Right now it is running a Enermax 431 AMD aproved power supply, and note that in my orginal comment i said that it would not run XP, but is fine with 2k, but i would like for it to run XP not 2k. I thought and still think it should be more stable on XP. XP is just basicaly version 2 of 2k. but any ways, now it has been downgraded to a file server. I wanted this to be a back up gaming setup, but i guess not.
Perhaps the RBLing (Realtime Black Hole) of msn.com recently, which
prevented a large amount of mail going out for about 4 days, has had a
positive influence in Redmond. They did agree to work on their anti-relay
capabilities at their POPs to get the RBL lifted.
-- Bill Campbell on Smail3-users
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