Gigabyte 8I955X Royal Intel 955X Motherboard Review

By: Ryan Shrout

This is a basic preview of this product intended for readers who just want
the quick look at the new product. If you are interested in the full review,
with all the technical data and benchmarks that you are used to seeing on PC Perspective, please click on this link to get to that article.

When Intel launched their new dual core Intel Pentium Extreme Edition
processors last month (and all the other dual core processorsfor that matter)
and most recently their Intel Pentium D line, they also released a new
chipset in order to bring support for the platform. The Intel 955X
chipset is aimed at the performance market and enthusiast crowd of users.
Gigabyte has prepped and readied a board based on this solution called
the 8I955X Royal. This board offers some good features, overclocking and performance.


The 8I955X Royal’s feature set includes four SATA channels that support
RIAD courtesy of the Intel ICH7R south bridge on the motherboard. The single IDE
channel that the Intel chipset provides may not be enough for a lot of users so
Gigabyte has also included an IDE controller that supplies two additional channels.
Of course, the standard USB 2.0 and Firewire support are integrated as well.

The Gigabyte 8I955X Royal motherboard had a lot to live up to being the first of
the new dual core capable motherboards to reach us for the Intel platform.
Intel’s 955X chipset doesn’t really offer anything new and exciting over
the 925X/E chipsets, with the exception of dual core processor support, so vendors
are going to struggle to find a way to make this new board generation stand out from their last.

Gigabyte has done an excellent job compiling overclocking, performance and
features into a somewhat reasonably priced motherboard. If you are eager to get
your hands on the latest Intel Pentium D or XE processors, the Gigabyte board
looks to be one of the best options for enthusiasts for dual core.

Intel 945 Express chipsets



Since the current chipsets didn't recognise more than one CPU, Intel had no choice
but to release new chipsets at the same time as its dual-core Pentium D and
Extreme Edition processors. Formerly codenamed "Lakeport", the mainstream
945 chipsets essentially provide the same features as the earlier 915 chipsets,
plus support for the Pentium D processors.

However, the new chipsets aren't simply an artificial designation to allow motherboards to handle dual-core processors; there are technical differences and improvements too, albeit incremental ones.

The 945 chipset can handle front-side bus speeds up to 1066MHz and
DDR2 memory up to 667MHz, providing up to 10.7GBps of peak memory bandwidth.
The latter should provide a noticeable performance boost compared to DDR2-533 systems. Maximum RAM is be limited to 4GB and there's no provision for ECC support.
As with its predecessor, the 945 chipset is available in both P and G versions.
The 845G differs from the 945P by the integration of Intel's GMA 950 onboard
graphics on to the northbridge. This is a faster version of the GMA 900 present
on the 915G chipset, up from 333MHz to 400MHz. The moderate speed hike
allows a throughput of up to 1.6GTexels/sec, more than adequate for 2D applications,
allowing desktop resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536 pixels at 75Hz and the ability to
run two monitors simultaneously via an ADD2 extension card. However, while
DirectX 9 3D performance is improved, with Vertex Shader 3.0 and T&L
operations still performed in software, this is insufficient for geometry-intensive games.

In addition to providing improved graphics, the GMA 950 supports
Media Expansion Cards, allowing a user to take advantage of several video output options in a single-card solution, to provide video input capability and PVR functionality
and to support a wide range of display types and configurations, including support
of HDTV playback on consumer electronic displays at either 720p or 1080i resolutions.

As with the previous ICH6 chips, the 945's southbridge chip is available in two versions,
the basic ICH7 or the ICH7R. Both include four integrated Serial ATA ports - supporting
SATA's new 3 GBps transfer rates to suitable hard drives or optical devices - 8 USB2.0 ports, support for 6 PCI slots and High-Definition Audio, a worthwhile improvement
over basic AC'97. The ICH7 offers 4 PCI-Express x1 lanes that can be combined to
form a single x4 port. The ICHR version differs by adding a further two
PCI-Express and an enhanced version of Intel's Matrix Storage Technology.

The latter allows two separate RAID partitions to be combined on one physical set of drives.
In addition to RAID0 (striping) and RAID1 (mirroring), the new version also allows for a combination of RAID5 (striping with parity) and RAID10 (stripped mirrors).
It also provides support for the AHCI specification, enabling hardware-assisted
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) for faster boot times and file transfers and the
hot-plugging of devices.

Available as options on both 945P and 945G chipsets are an Intel Gigabit LAN
interface and Intel's Active Management technology, useful for monitoring and
controlling PCs in an enterprise environment.

Intel 925X Express Chipset and Pentium 4 3.4 EE CPU Review

By John Reynolds

Times Are A-Changin’
The PC is ever-evolving, with new features and technologies brought to market at
what feels at times as an almost monthly basis. Yet this constant influx of new
technology is in somewhat stark contrast to other aspects of the PC that marches
to a decidedly slower pace: form factors, core logic, I/O buses, and other similar
industry standards. Intel, however, is changing this situation this year with the
introduction of the 9xx chipsets and their support for new technologies such
as PCI Express, High Definition audio, the LGA-775, or Socket T, format, and
DDR2 memory. In fact, one could argue that with this launch Intel is making
the most significant platform change of the past decade. And SimHQ will put
the potential real-world benefits of this new platform, combined with a
Pentium 4 3.4 GHz Extreme Edition processor, to the test by evaluating
it against our simulations-based benchmark suite.

Feature-rich Foundations

The 9xx series is comprised of the 925X (Alderwood) and 915 (Grantsdale)
chipsets, the former aimed at high-end enthusiasts and the latter for the
mainstream market. The two chipsets are essentially the same in their
features list, which is as follows:

• PCI Express Bus Architecture
• Dual Channel DDR2 533 MHz memory
• Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics
• High Definition Audio
• Matrix Storage Technology
• Wireless Connect Technology

PCI Express is perhaps of the most interest to hardware enthusiasts,
and is certainly the most important change to the PC bus architecture in years.
This new I/O bus is a serial, bi-directional connection that
gives 2.5 gigabits of bandwidth per lane. With embedded clock
signal and data encoding overhead, this translates to roughly
125 MB per second. Yet each PCI Express lane can be grouped with
additional lanes, which is where PCI Express graphics comes in;
essentially a 16-lane array or configuration, PCI Express x16
improves upon AGP 8X’s bandwidth by a considerable margin.
Moreover, its bi-directional design allows for graphics boards to
write to system memory, which will certainly facilitate the performance
of advanced features such as vertex instancing. The 9xx chipset series
will support one x16 slot and up to four x1 slots, the latter useful
for expansion boards such as network and sound cards; older PCI slots
are also present for legacy hardware support, and what combination
of the two is used will be determined by individual motherboard manufacturers.
The Intel motherboard used in the test system for this article has
four PCI and two PCI Express x1 slots.

The 925X and 915 chipsets both support dual channel DDR2 400 and 533 MHz
memory for a system bandwidth of 6.4 GB/sec and 8.5 GB/sec, respectively.
The 915 also supports traditional dual channel DDR and manufacturers
will be able to support DDR or DDR2, or both. In addition to this
increased bandwidth, the 925X’s north bridge chip (82925X) offers
increased memory performance over the 915’s (82915P) by inserting
“opportunistic maintenance commands” (think improved prefetch commands)
in the data path and minimizing latencies by optimizing access times via rearrangement of data stored in memory.

Intel’s Graphics Media Accelerator 900 is the company’s third generation
integrated graphics solution, and offers significant features and
performance improvements over previous offerings. GMA boasts support
for DirectX 9 and OpenGL 1.4, a 333 MHz clock speed, a maximum of
8.5 GB of bandwidth (system bandwidth when used with 533 MHz DDR2 memory),
4 pixel pipelines, and includes hardware support for Pixel Shader 2.0.
Worth noting, however, is that Vertex Shader 2.0 support is software-based,
so related tasks will be performed by the CPU. And while the GMA’s fill
rate and shared system bandwidth are insufficient to allow it to be
competitive with even mainstream add-in graphics boards, the impact
of its PS 2.0 support with game developers as the 9xx chipsets begin
to saturate the market this year could be important in terms of
advancing DX9-class technology in upcoming PC titles.

Integrated audio solutions are often inadequate for the needs of
those who seek an immersive aural environment. Intel’s High Definition Audio
looks to change that. A 192 kHz, 24-bit 8-channel onboard audio system,
HDA also supports audio formats such as DTS, Dolby, and THX. And possibly
more important to the business market, HDA also boasts support for
16-element array microphones for superior voice recognition.

Next is Intel’s Matrix Storage Technology, which is essentially Serial
ATA RAID support. Offering four Serial ATA ports, Matrix Storage allows
for a RAID 0 + 1 setup on only two hard drives. This is possible because
rather than being required to stripe (RAID 0) across the full drives,
the Matrix technology stripes across half of two drives, and then
mirrors (RAID 1) the remaining half. This theoretically gives the disk
performance boost of striping while providing the data integrity of mirroring.
In addition, the serial ATA ports include Native Command Queuing,
which looks to improve performance for even single drives by reorganizing
data access commands.

Last, the Wireless Connect Technology is integrated 802.11 g/b support
found in the south bridge chip (ICH6RW). PCs sporting the ICH6RW will be able
to connect to wireless networks or even act as hubs or access points for new networks. From a hardware or high-end gaming perspective, this technology is probably not the most fascinating of the features listed, but, again, as the 9xx series proliferates throughout the corporate market it could have widespread implications for the adoption of wireless connectivity.

Intel's 875P chipset and P4 3GHz processor

By: Scott Wasson

THE CHIPSET code-named Canterwood has been spoken about in hushed tones,
in the right circles, since its existence was first rumored on a leaked roadmap
or internal document somewhere. Core-logic chipsets may not seem too sexy to
the wider world, but we hardware geeks know better. The rumored specs on this
thing sounded amazing, and what's more, Intel was planning to offer products
targeted for PC enthusiasts bent on wringing the best possible performance out
of their PCs. Not only that, but Canterwood would be Intel's first chance to counter
AMD's upcoming processor platform, Athlon 64.

As you know, AMD's Athlon 64 didn't quite make it out the door. It's pushed back
until this fall while AMD works out some manufacturing snags. But Intel appears
to be right on schedule. Just over a week ago, a Canterwood sample platform
arrived at Damage Labs, ready for testing. Naturally, we rounded up every
competitor we could and put Canterwood through its paces. We've also thrown
in AMD's latest and greatest, the Athlon XP 3000+, to see how it measures up
to Intel's latest. Read on to see what we found.

Our 875P test platform has a large passive heat sink on the MCH chip

Introducing the 875P chipset
Now that it's hitting the market, Canterwood gets a "real"
name: the Intel 875P chipset. The 875P is the first of a new wave
of chipsets coming from Intel, most of which are currently nestled
under the code name Springdale. The 875P brings a whole range of
enhancements to the Pentium 4 platform, so I'd better bust out
the bullet points to be sure I cover them all. They are...

• An 800MHz front-side bus — The 875P, in conjunction with
Intel's new Pentium 4 3.0GHz chip, can run its front-side bus at
a clock speed of 800MHz, or, more specificially, a quad-pumped 200MHz.
All of the 875P's predecessors and current competitors max out
at 533MHz, which gives them 4.2GB/s of peak bandwidth, in theory.
The 875P's peak theoretical bus bandwidth is 6.4GB/s.

Intel's new 800MHz bus-ready Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor

• Dual channels of DDR400 memory — To match up with its nosebleed-inducing bus speed, Intel has given the 875P two channels of DDR400 memory. Working in concert, these memory channels can deliver up to 6.4GB/s of bandwidth, just like the 875P's 800MHz bus. Also, the 875P will support ECC memory

Dual Kingmax DDR400 DIMMs populate the 875P-based Intel mobo

• PAT — No, it's not a confusion-inducing, omni-gendered character from Saturday Night Live; it's a marketing term masquerading as a three-letter acronym. PAT stands for Performance Acceleration Technology, which is an astoundingly vague name for what Intel is doing with the memory controller.

What Intel is doing, in fact, is "binning" its chips, just like it does its processors. Here's my best guess about what's happening. In all likelihood, the 875P silicon will come from the same wafers and essentially be the same chips as Intel's upcoming Springdale chipset, but Springdale will be a cheaper, higher-volume product. (Springdale chipsets will differ from the 875P only in that they won't include PAT or support for ECC memory types.) The 875P will cost a little more, and will be aimed at workstation users and enthusiasts. Intel probably plans to pick the very fastest Canterwood/Springdale MCH (north bridge) chips and test them to verify they're capable of running with PAT enabled. The best of those chips will be sold as 875P MCH chips.

With PAT enabled, the 875P memory controller will perform some internal memory handling tasks faster, yielding a one-clock improvement in the time for a CPU request to perform memory access and another one-clock improvement in the DRAM chip select process. The total improvement—count with me here—is two clocks for each chip select (CS) process. CS happens at the beginning of a typical memory access, so cutting the CS process by two cycles could lead to real-world reductions in memory access latency.

(It's as if Intel were gearing up to fight a processor with an on-chip memory controller or something, innit?)
Intel emphasizes that 875P chipsets are tested rigorously, at full operating speed, for their ability to run with PAT enabled, so Canterwood motherboards ought to be plenty stable under normal operating conditions. Intel is also quick to point out that PAT happens internally in the memory controller, while external memory interfaces run according to their specifications.

A block diagram of the 875P chipset — Source: Intel

• AGP 8X — The 875P chipset supports AGP 8X, which offers 2.1GB/s of dedicated bandwidth for a graphics card. The current Intel mainstream chipset, 845PE, only offers AGP 4X, so this is an improvement.

• Hyper-Threading support — Ok, this isn't exactly new, but the 875P supports CPUs with Hyper-Threading, as do most Intel chipsets. You can read more about Hyper-Threading in our review of the first HT-capable processor.

• Serial ATA with RAID — The 875P's ICH5 chip is the first PC "south bridge" chip with built-in support for the new Serial ATA drive interface standard. The ICH5 includes two channels of Serial ATA 150, which works out to two ports for two devices, because Serial ATA offers a dedicated connection per channel. To learn more about Serial ATA, let me suggest our excellent comparison of Serial ATA and "parallel" ATA drives.

To underline the point that Canterwood is targeting us PC enthusiasts, Intel is making a special version of the ICH5 chip, the ICH5R, with Serial ATA RAID capability. Near as I can tell, this Intel test board will only support RAID 0, or striping, for increased performance. Intel's literature doesn't talk about the possibility of using RAID 1, which would be my preferred config. But then I'm an old fogey. You can read up on all the common RAID levels and their benefits in Diss's impressive ATA RAID round-up.

• Communications Streaming Architecture — Everybody knows the PCI bus is straining to keep up with today's high-speed devices, and most core-logic chipset designers have opted to incorporate more and more high-speed I/O interfaces on their chipsets' south bridge chips. Intel has taken that trend one step farther by incorporating a communications interface right on its MCH chip, where a Gigabit Ethernet chip (like Intel's own, for instance) can access memory without the latency associated with the MCH-ICH chip-to-chip interconnect or—heaven forbid—the PCI bus.

• Accelerated Hub Architecture — Oddly, Intel hasn't elected to update its Accelerated Hub Architecture to provide more bandwidth between the MCH and ICH chips. The ICH5 chip offers two Serial ATA 150 channels, two ATA/100 channels, and a PCI bus (that's 633MB/s of bandwidth right there), plus four USB 2.0 controllers and more, Intel's interconnect maxes out at 266MB/s. No wonder they cooked up the Communications Streaming Architecture for Gigabit Ethernet.

This decision is kind of curious. Intel's competitors have north-to-south bridge interconnects capable of anywhere from 533MB/s to 1GB/s, but the mighty Canterwood may strain under heavy I/O loads.

Taken together, these new features add up to a much more potent Pentium 4 platform, especially because of the extra bandwidth afforded by the new front-side bus, dual memory channels, and the AGP bus. The P4 has long excelled at streaming media and I/O tasks, and the 875P looks to throw that trend into overdrive.

Intel 865 chipset




If the i875 chipset can be viewed as the logical successor to i850E, then its mainstream variant, the i865 chipset - formerly codenamed Springdale - can be viewed as the logical successor to the i845 series of chipsets. Not only do the i875/i865 chipsets represent a huge technological leap compared to their predecessors, but the performance gap between the pair of recent chipsets is significantly less than it was between the i850E and i845 family.

There is a clear trend in PC hardware towards parallel processes, epitomised by Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. However, there are other examples of where performing several tasks at the same time is preferable to carrying out a single task quickly. Hence the increasing popularity of small RAID arrays and now the trend towards dual-channel memory subsystems.

Currently, there are two different strategies being employed in dual-channel memory controllers, one in which where each memory bank has its own memory channel and an arbiter distributes the load between them and the other to actually create a wider memory channel, thereby "doubling up" on standard DDR's 64-bit data paths. In common with the i875P chipset, the i865's Memory Controller Hub employs the latter, the same conditions for dual-channel operation also applying.
The i865 memory controller is the same as that used by the i875P chipset, supporting:
• Hyper Threading
• Dual 64-bit DDR memory channels
• Communication Streaming Architecture bus for gigabit Ethernet
and capable of being paired with either the ICH5 or ICH5R chip - which handles things like the 10/100 Ethernet interface, 6-channel AC97 audio interface, USB 2.0, the PCI bus, etc., to provide the following additional features:

• 8 USB 2.0 ports
• Dual independent Serial ATA ports
The ICH5R also provides software RAID for Serial ATA drives.
The upshot is that - unlike the i875P - i865 chipsets are available in three different versions:
• i865P: supports DDR266 and DDR333 memory only and doesn't support the 800MHz FSB.
• i865PE: as per i865P, plus 800MHz FSB and DDR400 memory support.
• i865G: as per i865PE, plus Intel's integrated graphics core.

While the i865G's graphics core is the same as was featured on the i845G chipset, its performance will be faster, due both to a faster memory subsystem and a higher working frequency of the graphics core itself

Chipset

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A chipset, PC chipset or chip set refers to a group of integrated circuits, or chips, that are designed to work together. They are usually marketed as a single product.

Computers

Diagram of a motherboard chipset
In computing, the term chipset is commonly used to refer to a set of specialized chips on a computer's motherboard or an expansion card. In personal computers the first chipset for the IBM PC AT was the NEAT chipset by Chips and Technologies for the Intel 80286 CPU.

Based on Intel Pentium-class microprocessors, the term chipset often refers to a specific pair of chips on the motherboard: the northbridge and the southbridge. The northbridge links the CPU to very high-speed devices, especially main memory and graphics controllers, and the southbridge connects to lower-speed peripheral buses (such as PCI or ISA). In many modern chipsets, the southbridge actually contains some on-chip integrated peripherals, such as Ethernet, USB, and audio devices.


A chipset is usually designed to work with a specific family of microprocessors. Because it controls communications between the processor and external devices, the chipset plays a crucial role in determining system performance.

The manufacturer of a chipset often is independent from the manufacturer of the motherboard. Current manufacturers of chipsets for PC-compatible motherboards include NVIDIA, AMD, VIA Technologies, SiS, Intel and Broadcom. Apple computers and Unix workstations from Sun, NeXT, SGI, and others have traditionally used custom-designed chipsets; now that Sun and Apple both have x86 processors in at least some of their lines of products, they have begun to use standard PC chipsets in some of their computers. Some server manufacturers also develop custom chipsets for their products.

In the 1980s, Chips and Technologies, founded by Gordon Campbell, pioneered the manufacturing of chipsets for PC-compatible computers. Computer systems produced since then often share commonly used chipsets, even across widely disparate computing specialties. For example, the NCR 53C9x, a low-cost chipset implementing a SCSI interface to storage devices, could be found in Unix machines such as the MIPS Magnum, embedded devices, and personal computers.

In home computers, game consoles and arcade game hardware of the 1980s and 1990s, the term chipset was used for the custom audio and graphics chips. Examples include the Commodore Amiga's Original Chip Set or SEGA's System 16 chipset.