Intel i875P Chipset review

[Big B]

If you though Granite Bay was exciting, you'll love to know that the i875P chipset along with ICH5/R is to die for.

Hot Hardware's review:

Another way to enhance P4 performance, is by providing the CPU with more bandwidth via associated bus interfaces. Simply cranking up CPU clock cycles, will certainly bring you incremental performance. However, giving the processor enough bandwidth to get out to other system resources and peripherals, is also critical for overall throughput. Otherwise you'll have the equivalent of a jet fueled Funny Car, sitting in neutral, red-lining the engine and going nowhere fast. As such, we've witnessed both Intel and AMD taking System Bus (or Front Side Bus) speeds up a notch or two, along the way of their respective roadmaps. At 2.26 and 2.4GHz, Intel took the Pentium 4 to a 533MHz System Bus, with a Quad Pumped 133MHz reference clock. This time around, at 3GHz, Intel gives us an 800MHz System Bus, with a Quad Pumped 200MHz reference clock. However, we are reminded once again, of a lesson taught to us by our Asian friends, that of "yin and yang", or balance. To compliment this extra bus bandwidth Intel also brought forth Dual Channel DDR400 memory support.

[H]ard|OCP also has a good writeup on the i875P chipset.

The "P" stands for performance, and this 875 chipset is actually going to wear two hats. It will be both Intel's high performance desktop chipset and also double as an entry level workstation chipset as well. There will be a couple of differences, with the only one worth mentioning being the addition of ECC support on the workstation part. The i875P comes with one of two southbridges, either the ICH5 or the ICH5R. The "R" stands for RAID and the "ICH" part stands for everything besides the kitchen sink. Take a look at the chipset in this graphical representation, as it will give you a much better idea of what is available than me listing every single item.

The SATA RAID function and the separate bus for Gigabit ethernet have me just giddy. Even if the P4 doesn't tickle your fancy, the i875P should have you drooling. If not, I suggest getting your pulse checked.