Pentium 4'ts new mascot

The new 875P chipset with Dual DDR400 will replace the 850E in the performance/ professional segment.

The price for the i875P chipset, including the ICH-R, is $53 USD. Motherboard manufacturers who want to save $3 can pay $50 USD for the Southbridge without RAID on the ICH5 Southbridge.

In any case, Intel still wants to bring the Springdale-G chipset to the market this quarter. This chipset, with its slightly reduced set of features, should be less expensive. However, the Springdale will be equipped with 200 MHz FSB as well.

The 875P chipset marks a few milestones for Intel; for starters, it depicts Intel as a company that does listen to the needs and requests of their customers - mainly in its support for DDR400 memory technology. Embracing DDR400 SDRAM is something we never thought we would see Intel do, especially considering their stance on the technology in the past, thus we were quite surprised when we heard of the possibility last year at Computex Taiwan.

Enabling 800MHz FSB support on the 875P chipset itself was more of a validation task for Intel; in fact, the amount of work Intel had to do in order to enable the support was relatively minimal considering that many 845PE chipsets will work fine at the increased frequency. Intel will not be offering 845PE chipsets with official support for the 800MHz FSB, so approach such boards at your own risk

One drawback of the I875P chipset is its removal of the 400Mhz FSB. This means if you want to use an I875P you will need either a 533Mhz or 800Mhz FSB CPU. Springdale-G will however support 400/533/800Mhz FSB.







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