Introduction

By now most of us know of Intel's latest introduction to the Pentium 4 platform, the i865 chipsets. These new chipsets are designed to take on certain sectors, including super low budget, integrated solutions and mainstream desktop.

While Intel planned for the i875P to take the gold, to the market's surprise i865PE chipsets have proven to be just as fast. And with all the major features of the i875P such as support for Serial ATA RAID, CSA networking and Dual Channel DDR-400 memory, it is no wonder that the i865PE has become the weapon of choice.

Today at TweakTown we have been looking at the market and have noticed that different motherboard manufacturers produce different styles and quality of boards. Looking further, motherboard manufacturers are divided into tiers. ABIT, ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI take up the Tier 1, top line boards. EPoX, Soyo and Shuttle (amongst others) make up Tier 2; cost effective yet powerful boards. ECS, Albatron, PCChips, Asrock and FIC make up Tier 3; low-end motherboards.

This month, we will be putting the best of Tier 1, best of Tier 2 and best of Tier 3 motherboards head to head. Today we are doing Tier 1, ABIT vs. Gigabyte.

From ABIT, we have acquired the IS7-G; the top of the line i865PE board from the well known overclocking kings. In the other corner, we have Gigabyte's 8PENXP, the successor to the 8KNXP Canterwood board with just as many features. Who will take out the gold? Let's find out.