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."

Comments

Decline of the hardware reviews (and Slashdot)

[tshoppa]

Again, the most prominent, first-mentioned, feature of the Intel reference motherboard is its... Black Color.

Re:Decline of the hardware reviews (and Slashdot)

[tshoppa]

It's the natural color of the epoxy resin usually used in PCB's based on G-10 glass epoxy.

Masking to get other colors is generally pretty cheap. In some cases (for example UV resistance) dyes can be put in the glass epoxy at manufacture time.

Looks Great, Less Thrashing

[SEWilco]

As if that weren't enough, Intel's new "Blue Mountain" motherboard comes on a black PCB...

Wow. I eagerly await a candy-striped peppermint-flavored board, which surely will give better performance and more bang for the buck.

No Credibility

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:No Credibility

[goldcd]

That was a joke. "You all thought I was going to say it didn't come with an optional dancing midget and what I actually said was I made up the Firewire bit."

Re:No Credibility

[pacc]

You don't fit in on slashdot.

Anyone here should see that firewire is included in the features on an Intel motherboard and chuckle at the impossibly sublime humour of the reviewer, not needing any explanation.

I mean, firewire, Intel, hello

Re:No Credibility

[Nintendork]

This threw me off at first too as I scanned the text for the interesting parts. It took me a few seconds to link it up with the Midget joke.

-Lucas

Re:bad news for Linux?

[sirinek]

I'd moderate you (-1, Misguided)

YEARS?! I'll bet you a beer that this motherboard is usable *now* in Linux, or will be with the next 2.4 release (which come out reasonably quickly, say every month or so). What do you think it has that you cant use under Linux today, with the latest 2.4 kernel?

siri

great

[tps12]

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?

Anandtech has 3 motherboards reviewed

[McVeigh]

http://anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html

Once again.

[Gekko]

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.

Is it me....

[trims]

... 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:

• Data Starved Processors - and this is all about latency (and, to a lesser extent, bandwidth) to main memory. I don't care if there is DDR400 memory support, what I want to kow is why isn't there a L3 cache? I mean, even the high-end Xeons these days have a max of 1MB or so on-die L2. Sure that's great, but do you know how many common datasets blow right through that? It's often dozens (if not hundreds) of cycles to access main RAM. The alpha architecture did L3 on the motherboard way back in 1994 or so. Why don't these modern server chipsets support 16MB or so of SRAM for L3 cache? Hell, they should probably support 64MB or so.
• Improved hyperthreading support - go check out the Ars Technica article on this. Hyperthreading can potentially really help performance, but it's being held back by (among other things) problems with cache coherency and loading. While much of this is on the CPU (and thus, a chipset can't help), there are a bunch of stuff that could be moved into the chipset for help.
• Useful shit in the Chipset - ATA/133 isn't that useful (vs ATA/100). Firewire is OK, as is USB 2.0, but what I want to know is where are nice stuff like block data copy between video and RAM (like the SGI chipsets for the Indy/O2 had) for high-performance video processing? AGP is a joke for this (as anyone doing video processing will tell you). These chipsets are aimed at workstations, after all.
• Standard interfaces for custom silicon - no, I'm not talking PCI-X or crap like that. There should be a standard interface directly to the chipset for people who want to do custom silicon ASICs and have them have direct access to the high-bandwidth internals of the chipset. I mean, even in the low end, why should a FCAL controller chip have to pass the PCI bus? Or a hard-core encryption coprocessor? Or a hardware routing ASIC? All need several GB of bandwidth directly to memory (or each other), and I can't see any reason not to have them surface mounted next to the north bridge with a dedicated interface.

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

Re:Is it me....

[Pulzar]

Standard interfaces for custom silicon - no, I'm not talking PCI-X or crap like that. There should be a standard interface directly to the chipset for people who want to do custom silicon ASICs and have them have direct access to the high-bandwidth internals of the chipset. I mean, even in the low end, why should a FCAL controller chip have to pass the PCI bus? Or a hard-core encryption coprocessor? Or a hardware routing ASIC? All need several GB of bandwidth directly to memory (or each other), and I can't see any reason not to have them surface mounted next to the north bridge with a dedicated interface.

Expect something like this in the early 2004, when 3GIO chipsets come out to production.. most will have 4+ side-ports directly to the northbridge to used as you please. The plan is to use them for peripherals, but you'd be free to attach anything that talks 3GIO. It probably won't be quite "a few GB of bandwidth", but that really depends on the chipset designer, and not a protocol/interface limitation.

Improved hyperthreading support - go check out the Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] article on this. Hyperthreading can potentially really help performance, but it's being held back by (among other things) problems with cache coherency and loading. While much of this is on the CPU (and thus, a chipset can't help), there are a bunch of stuff that could be moved into the chipset for help.

What usefull stuff can the chipset do for hyperthreading? I'd love to hear some ideas.

The high end looks very, very, very depressingly identical to the cheap consumer crap.

"Cheap consumer crap" is what sells the most, and most companies do not have the resources to do work on more than a couple of chipsets at a time, so most of the R&D time is spent on implementing the new standards and getting things to work at the new frequencies that CPUs and RAM require. Maybe things will get better when the economy picks up and high end becomes more profitable once again.

Re:Is it me....

[Zathrus]

As usual, the last 10% of performance does not equate to the last 10% of price.

If you need the features/benefits that are available in that last 10%, then you're going to have to pay a huge premium. Or wait a few years for it to filter down to the other 90%.

Go back a decade and try to get 3D video at 640x480 that runs close to 30 fps. You're talking an SGI Oxygen with a RealityEngine2 costing about $500k or so.

Now I can buy a card that does all that, at a higher resolution and fps, with better textures for about $50.

But if you needed that ability 10 years ago then you paid the price. Such is life at the bleeding edge.

No Serial ATA? No Sale...

[jefftp]

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.

Re:No Serial ATA? No Sale...

[stratjakt]

Parellel to USB converters dont work for every parallel printer, and rarely ever work for other things that interface over the parallel port.

Same with USB emulated serial(COM) ports..

I'm talking about stuff like PSX-N64 DexDrives/Dreamcast VMU/GB/GBA/NeoGeo Pocket/OpenXBox readers/flashers, all of which I have, and all of which have had 0 success trying to interface over anything but a true parallel or serial port.

AFAIK, you cant get register level control over a USB/parallel port, or some such technical blibber-blabber. I just know it doesnt work. Nor can it drive the old bubblejet in my closet.

So while I'm all for the idea of moving ahead, I want all my gizmos to work. There should be (and are) boards without the legacy stuff, and those with.

BTW I need my FDC too, to move data to my SuperUFO32 SNES backup unit. And I still need maxell 650 discs burned at 1x, as they're the only media my TurboDuo reads correctly. So dont talk to me about 72x burners and bootable cds.

I'm sure there are many other similar, if unrelated, situations where legacy stuff is necessary.

That's not the only review

[nenolod]

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.

Re:ATA133 _is_ important, for size

[cheezedawg]

Incorrect. There are ATA 100 controllers out on the market now that use the 48 bit LBA. In fact, Maxtor is pretty much the only company that does any ATA/133 (and that is because it isn't a finalized standard yet). The IBM and WD drives that you cite are ATA 100.