Thanks for your reply.
I did go to dansdata ages back but never bookmarked it.
Whilst doing a search I kinda found my answer.
can I post it? courtesy of dansdata…
Springdale is the mass market chipset. The base Springdale flavour, the 865PE, supports P4s up to and including the “C” models, dual channel DDR memory up to DDR400 speed (but not ECC RAM), and the now-standard AGP 8X. It’s also got Intel’s “Communications Streaming Architecture”, a separate bus just for a Gigabit Ethernet controller. This ought to actually significantly improve Gigabit Ethernet throughput, provided the devices at each end of the connection can actually pump more data than they could through a PCI Gigabit controller.
If you’re not connecting your PC to a Gigabit network - and, today, you’re probably not - then CSA won’t do anything but take some load off PCI.
The 865PE chipset also natively supports USB 2.0 and IEEE-1394 (FireWire and fancy multichannel audio and a number of other things that practically every motherboard these days supports, but which always get listed anyway, because a mobo ain’t a mobo if its feature list doesn’t go on and on like a Russian novel.
There’s also an 865G integrated-graphics version of Springdale, with the usual “3D? What 3D?” level of gaming performance. Yes, Intel have an Extreme Name for the graphics adapter, but it’ll still be beaten senseless by any current budget 3D card. It’s got more than enough power for office work, though.
There’s also a mildly cut-down “865P” chipset, which has all the 865PE fruit except for 800MHz FSB and DDR400 memory support.
And then, there’s Canterwood. It’s got everything Springdale’s got, plus a couple of little extras.
One of them is Intel’s “Performance Acceleration Technology” (PAT), which is a definite candidate for the John Smith Most Generic Name Award.
PAT shaves off some memory access clock cycles to give a measurable, but not very significant, improvement in speed (less than 10% at best, for real world tasks, and usually less than 5%), if you’re using Dual DDR400 memory and an 800MHz-bus P4. If you aren’t, it does nothing. And, as it turns out, the more modules you have, the less it does, generally speaking. PAT isn’t worth getting very excited about.
If you want to build a server, or just drop serious dollars on pushing the maximum-RAM envelope, you’ll be pleased to learn that i875 supports ECC RAM. I don’t think any ECC DDR400 memory’s available yet, though.
And that’s it for Canterwood’s extras over Springdale, except for the fact that Canterwood chips have, we’re told, passed the test that Springdale failed. This means they’re, in theory at least, better silicon, and may therefore be good for higher clock speeds. Thus far, there’s been no evidence to suggest that there’s actually a significant difference.
As for the graphics card…
A powercolour (who?) 9700pro.
Its a very cheap model and bencmarks a treat.
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Mzcz
