SUMMARY: The new i845 based motherboards are coming out all over the place. Up today is the Intel reference board and a little background on the i845G chipset itself. How can it stand up to the stiff competition out there? Come join Cameron "Sov" Johnson to see for yourself. It has everything but the kitchen sink thrown in the design, but let's see just how well it actually performs!
Not surprisingly, Intel has been the biggest leader in chipset manufacturing for their entire range of processors, and until recently, Intel's performance on their chipsets for their platform solutions could not be beat by their industry rivals. Lately, this has changed with more cost effective solutions and newer technology that Intel has taken longer to adopt. However, Intel has always tried to give a good product.
Intel's greatest chipset ever, and this is just about one we all agree on, was the Intel 440BX chipset for the Intel Pentium 3. This chipset had the raw speed to totally demolish any VIA or SiS competitor of its time, and even when competitors brought newer chipsets supporting newer technology, the i440BX still took the crown.
When Intel realized that having the performance market was not doing for them what they hoped, they began their road towards the value market. Celeron was the ultimate value market solution before AMD Duron, and after all, the only thing that was competing was the AMD K6-2. Intel released new chipsets for Celeron CPU's that supported value based expansion, such as onboard video, onboard sound and even onboard LAN. This proved to be quite a big hit. The i815 chipset was Intel's greatest achievement in performance/value technology. The i815 supported onboard i752 graphics core that was tied directly into the AGP bus to allow for maximum 2x AGP transfers. This card was excellent for value and office applications and suited Celeron.
This same chip also included Dynamic AGP technology, where by if you installed an AGP video card into the onboard AGP slot, the internal graphics was shut down and external video took over. This fit the performance/mainstream market, Pentium 3 heaven.
With Intel Pentium 4 coming in and rumors about Intel releasing its value Intel Celeron based on the P4 technology, we are needing a new value chipset while at the same time still giving support for Intel's latest Pentium 4 processors. Introducing the Intel i845G, 533FSB supporting chipset.
