Date:
Sunday , April 13, 2003
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Steve Lynch
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Intel's 875P "Canterwood" & 800MHz FSB P4

We look at the new i875P Canterwood chipset and the Dual Channel DDR400 that it brings with it. And of course we show off the 800MHz Front Side Bus and one of the Pentium 4s built to do it.

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Canterwood / i875P Mainboards

Many times when we get the opportunity to have a first look at new technology, we are left with a reference board and very little else. This is not the case with the i875P. We have no less than four working mainboards here in the Underground Bunker and we have used every one of them to contribute to this article.

ABIT IC7-G

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This is the board we used for all of our benchmarking data in this article. ABIT once again has put together a very smart board that was a pleasure to work with. Notice the cooling on the board pictured; we will cover this in our OC section.

Intel D875PBZ

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If you are not an enthusiast or are simply looking for stable mainboards without all the OC features, which is something nice to have when you run an IT department, Intel makes their own mainboards. While Intel boards are not a staple of most of our readers, they have put together an extremely impressive board that delivered great scores.

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One feature that most of the boards had was a notification on the BIOS splash screen that verified that you were in fact in Dual Channel DDR mode and at what speed the bus was functioning. Our Intel i875P mainboard was not a production board but rather a sample. This was the first time I have seen Intel leave the POST screen visible. A very nice addition that I hope makes it to the retail version.

Also, in the second picture above you will notice that all the slots are filled with Corsair XMS TwinX memory. That is a total of 2GB running at DCDDR400 with very aggressive timings.

Gigabyte GA-8KNXP Ultra

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Gigabyte has supplied us with what is easily identifiable as one of the most complete mainboards we have ever seen. I highly suggest you check out the feature list on this board. It is amazing that it fits into an ATX format. If ATA RAID, Serial SATA RAID, and Ultra320 SCSI RAID don't interest you, I am sure it has some other features that will. Like maybe 6-phase power or the six memory slots?

MSI 875P Neo

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MSI's board showed up a bit later than the others and has not been fully tested. It does look to be quite impressive though and offers a wide array of overclocking features.

Recap

As we mentioned above, we will all be seeing available boards very soon. I think there will be boards with just about any feature combination available, and I am sure with so many boards out there the prices will certainly be competitive. Rest assured that i875P is very much going to be here and now. This is very far from a paper launch, or so I am informed.