Intel 845PE Chipset

Speaking about the chipsets to support the new Pentium 4 CPUs with 800MHz processor bus, we should definitely mention i845PE. Although this chipset doesn’t officially support 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, the practice shows that there re hardly any problems with this chipset using 200MHz FSB. Many mainboard manufacturers took advantage of this fact and announced their products based on i845PE with the 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus support among the specs. Therefore, we have every right to include i845PE in the list of chipsets, which will be able to work with the new Pentium 4 processors.

Of course, unlike i875 or i865, this chipset doesn’t support dual-channel memory. With FSB frequency set to 200MHz, you can only use single-channel DDR400 SDRAM memory. However, there is one very important argument in favor of i845PE as a solution for the new Pentium 4 processors: the price. Even though the new i875 and i865 chipsets do not require the expensive 6-layer PCBs, the engineering expenses during the mainboards production are still quite high. Besides, the chipsets themselves are somewhat more expensive than the good old i845PE. That is why mainboards based on i845PE supporting 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus can turn out quite a good buy, especially in the beginning.

Specifications of Discrete Chipsets Supporting 800MHz Bus

The table below compares three discrete chipsets supporting 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus one way or another. They are: i875P, i865PE and i845PE:

Testbed and Methods

The major goal of this test session was to find out the advantages of the faster 800MHz bus used with the new Pentium 4 processors. Namely, how greatly the Pentium 4 systems performance could improve this way. At the same time we also tested the new i875 and i865 chipsets, and checked the performance of the old buddy i845PE with the system bus overclocked up to 800MHz. As for the new i865 and i875 chipsets, we certainly were very much interested in their performance with different memory types and in the advantages of the PAT technology implemented in i875.

Therefore we tested the following solutions:

• Intel D875PBZ mainboard based on i875P. We tested this mainboard with 533MHz and 800MHz bus frequencies and used DDR400 SDRAM as well as DDR333 and DDR266 SDRAM in dual-channel mode.

• Intel D865PERL based on i865PE. We tested this mainboard the same way as described above.
• ASUS P4PE based on i845PE chipset. This mainboard, which has stood the test of time already, works perfectly well at up to 200MHz FSB, therefore, we managed not only to run the tests for 533MHz bus frequency, but also for 800MHz.

Also for a more illustrative and complete comparison we took the results obtained from an AND Athlon XP 3000+ working in the fastest configuration possible: with NVIDIA nForce2 based mainboard and DDR333 SDRAM.

As a result, out testbeds looked as follows:

All dual-channel chipsets were tested in dual-channel mode. The mainboards BIOS’s were set to get the maximum performance. All benchmarks were run in Windows XP SP1 operation system.