Date:
Sunday , June 20, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Intel's new 775LGA CPUs and 925/915 chipsets

We kick the tires on PCI-Express, DDR2, and a new Intel CPU and socket. And of course we compare them to AMD's top end and a couple of legacy systems as well.

continued...

The 925X and 915G Chipsets

Along with new 775 LGA CPUs and sockets, we also see a new family of Intel motherboard chipsets, the 925X and the 915G. There will be several derivatives of the 915G chipset; the “G” we are seeing here today has integrated graphics.

We will not be focusing on the on-chip graphics, but suffice it to say that it is not up to the standards of anyone that plays games very often. You can, however, play some games on it like UT2K3 deathmatch at low resolutions and it works quite well.

The new 91X and 925X chipsets also have new sound and SATA technologies built in. We will be covering those features as we start seeing them appear in retail motherboards.

The 915G and 925X

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Intel 915G

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Intel 925X

PCI-Express Video & DDR2

The two big moves we are seeing today are the addition of a PCI-Express Graphics interface as well as DDR2 support. The PCI-Express graphics bus will bring across 3X the amount of bandwidth than the AGP 8X bus, and PCI-Express will also make the bus full duplex, something not possible with AGP technology. DDR2 is an extension of current DDR technology which will allow the MHz to scale even higher. The first sticks of DDR2 we will see on the market will be rated at speeds of 533MHz with timings of 4-4-4-12.

No AGP & No DDR

Unlike some previous platform transitions, this one allows for little on legacy tag alongs. Notice that neither support AGP, so you will not be migrating your current video card purchase to motherboards supporting this new chipset. Also note that we will not be seeing "in between" boards that have DDR and DDR2 slots. (Or at least we are not aware of any as of writing this.) VIA is working on their PT890 chipset that we are hoping will have both AGP and PCI-Express X16 for video cards on board, but we have yet to see it working at performance levels that would be acceptable in the retail market.

Now with that said, while you will not see many "in between" boards, if any at all, do be relieved to know that the 915G chipset does in fact support DDR. In fact, it is likely that you see many 915G motherboards with DDR slots, allowing for a much easier (and likely performance enhanced) upgrade path.

New Southbridge Features

The new ICH6 southbridge has support for additional PCI-Express X1 slots as well as 8 USB 2.0 ports, 4 SATA RAID ports, and new "High Definition" audio.

915? 925? What's the difference?

Well, to be quite honest, at this point in time it's hard to tell, as you will see from our benchmarks following a few pages from now. If you take Intel's own literature that covers the features of their top end performance desktop motherboards, you will find very little difference.

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Looking at the above sales literature, the only difference I can find between the 925 and the 915, with the exception of integrated graphics, is Gigabit LAN on the 925. (And Intel sees the importance of FireWire finally!!) Interestingly enough, you can see that the 875 chipset board is still very much alive and well in the new market and placed in step before the 915 motherboards.

So, is there no difference? Well, of course there is. Remember PAT? Or Intel Performance Acceleration Technology? You know, that little performance trick that Taiwan motherboard makers busted wide open and started applying to the lowly 865 chipset so that many retail boards were actually faster than the 875? Well, the motherboard makers did not exactly implement PAT, but their own forms of GAT, HAT, THIS and THAT...

This time around, Intel's flagship desktop chipset has a memory bandwidth enhancing technology as well, but they have not painted a target on it this time as they did with the 875 chipset and branded PAT name.

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Again, we see an optimized memory data stream. We have yet to see an impact of this, but as DDR2 memory speeds scale upward, we will possibly see some advantage to this new data maintenance technology.