Canterwood Motherboards Refined

YingYang writes "With Intel's i875P (otherwise known as Canterwood) chipset launch a couple of weeks ago, we were shown what an 800MHz System Bus can do for performance of the Pentium 4. At the time however, there were few Taiwanese OEM motherboards out and test-beds used to showcase the new chipset and throttled-up P4, were based on Intel designed motherboards. Now however, the Canterwoods are beginning to flow out of Taiwan and vendors like Abit and Asus have put together boards with a ton of integrated features and performance, that reminds us of the days of the 'BX,' when Intel chipsets were the only way to fly. Check out this Abit/Asus Canterwood head to head comparison at HotHardware."

Comments

Re:Side mount IDE connectors

[GiorgioG]

Going to take a guess and say it's easier to connect a cable that way.

Re:Side mount IDE connectors

[Anonymous Coward]

It allows the cable to flow more naturally out and away from the motherboard.... Also, it moves the insertion and removal stress lateral to the MB, so you don't flex it....

Re:Is this worth the price?

[drinkypoo]

I don't even think playing 3d games at 200fps really makes a difference then 150fps either...

This ignorant statement gets repeated (With, of course, ever-increasing frame rates plugged into it) so often that I feel compelled to blow it away here before it gets voted up by some mod bastards.

The "fps" rating is an average. As the number of polygons and lights in a scene changes over time, so does the time to render a frame. You might have 150fps average but get, say, 20 fps when you walk into a big open room and find eight or nine people blowing each other away with assorted lighting effects and so on occurring.

Also, more bandwidth means you can sustain higher fill rates which in turn means you can run higher resolutions. While this is much less of an issue now between CPU and video card because of onboard T&L which we have enjoyed greatly since nvidia brought it to PC gaming with the GeForce 256, pushing textures still depends on bus bandwidth. Anything memory-intensive does as well, so doing video encoding (a much more common practice than you think; witness all the DVD copy software out there) is highly dependent on memory bandwidth. Since intel is not using an integrated memory controller, this makes a big difference. AMD doesn't need as much FSB speed in the Athlon 64 and Opteron as intel needs in P4, because they have an integrated memory controller.