SUMMARY: Intel's I875P Canterwood Dual Channel DDR-400, 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 chipset has been out for a while now. Many companies have produced motherboards based on this chipset, one company is Gigabyte with their 8KNXP. It has more features than you would want to poke a stick at, but with stick in hand Cameron "Sov" Johnson gives us his impressions and bench tests against Intel's reference Canterwood motherboard.
Today Pentium 4 users are finally seeing what Intel has to offer, not because of new additions to the processor but by finally giving their supporters and end users what has been wanted a cheap memory solution that gives full bandwidth that the Pentium 4 craves.
Intel gave the Pentium 4 in the beginning the memory bandwidth the Pentium 4 needed with Dual Channel RDRAM. This memory was not popular when the Pentium 3 used it, so RDRAM was slow, had a huge latency penalty due to its serial nature and cost a rather large amount to purchase. Very few people were willing to pay the price for the Pentium 4 and the RDRAM and with that the Pentium 4 didnt look so good.
I845 series of chipsets did fill in this blank. Designed to take advantage of DDR SDRAM but was still not able to give the Pentium 4 the required memory bandwidth, I845D was only able to give 2.1GB/s as was the E and G series, I845PE and GE allowed for up to 2.7GB/s, still well below the 5.3GB/s that the Pentium 4 was able and required for full speed operations.
SiS was the first to give the Pentium 4 what it needed, Dual Channel DDR SDRAM interface. SiS 655 allowed for Dual DDR-333 memory to give 5.3GB/s memory bandwidth, pushing the Pentium 4 to its theoretical limits. Intel not to be outdone took its time to release the new Canterwood and Springdale chipsets. These added Dual Channel DDR-400 and 800MHz FSB.
Today we are looking at Gigabytes latest offering for the Pentium 4 based on the Intel I875P or better known as the Canterwood chipset. Will this board measure up? Lets take a good look.
