This is an era of rich media for both home and business. But multimedia and real time 3-D applications-ripping CDs, playing the latest 3-D computer games, authoring multimedia content, and the like-require substantial memory bandwidth, which has demanded high-end systems, in the past.

Intel is altering that equation with the launch of the 865PE chip set, formerly codenamed Springdale. The Santa Clara chip giant recently introduced the 875P, its new dual-channel chip set that lets high-end systems use DDR400 memory. (See "Intel Opens Up Headroom with Canterwood" and "Intel Hits a Home Run"). The high-end desktop systems the 875P targets typically cost $2,000 or more.

About seven months ago, nVidia released their nForce2 chipset that supported dual-channel DDR333. This gave AMD the edge over Intel's 845PE which only supported single-channel DDR333. Intel responded to that threat with the release of the Springdale chipset. Since then, Intel has split the Springdale into two different chipsets: the 865 (Springdale) and the 875 (Canterwood). The primary difference between the two chipsets is that the Canterwood features PAT, which is touted to improve performance. The Springdale will be the cheaper of the two chipsets, focused towards the mainstream market. With the announcement of the Springdale new, AOpen has released a brand new motherboard, the AOpen AX4SG Max. AOpen has pulled out all of the stops on this motherboard, which is representative of the quality that AOpen puts into all their motherboards.

I know many of you will be wanting to know about OCing a Springdale board as opposed to a Canterwood. The particular IS7-G that I got from ABIT last week will run at an impressive 300MHz+ FSB.

After launching the i875P (codename Caterwood) chipset about one month ago, Intel pushes out the budget version of the same silicon wrapped in more humble clothes. Featuring a reduced package size with lower pin count and stripped of some features relating either to performance (PAT) or else to data integrity (ECC), the new 865 chipset family comes at approximately 30% savings over the more expensive Canterwood chipset.

4 boards tested

ASUS P4P800 Deluxe
Chaintech 9PJL
EPoX 4PDA2+
FIC 865PE Max

Springdale is the latest chipset from Intel targeting the desktop users and gamers. Considered as the scale down version of the Canterwood, it is designed to deliver a balanced platform with innovative features valued by home and office PC users.

Well, it seems that the i865PE chipset holds its own very nicely when placed head to head against the i875P chipset. Since the i865PE is geared more towards the enthusiast market, while i875P is geared more towards a workstation environment, the minor performance losses we are seeing here do not justify heading out and throwing down the extra green on an i875P board unless you want the best of the best. From our benchmarks, we can see that Intels Performance Acceleration Technology does indeed have some effect on the overall performance of the system, but in the end it turned out to be fairly small.

As we have seen, both the i865PE and i865G chipsets hold their own quite nicely against the high end i875P chipset. It seems that as we progress into the more modern benchmarks which are more processor and graphically intensive, we see greater gains from the i875P chipset. As we expected, both the i865PE and i865G chipsets performed in unison throughout all the tests, as they well should. If you took a look at the scores of the Intel Extreme Graphics 2, youll know immediately that this isnt something youll want to be doing any real gaming on, especially if it involves the more modern games.

OCAddiction takes a look at the FIC VL11PE motherboard today based on the Springdale chipset which was officially launched today by Intel Corp. The 865 Springdale may not be aimed directly at the performance desktop crowd out there but it is putting up some very impressive numbers.

Our first foray into the performance Springdale chipset unearthed a few surprises. It seemed to be stupendously fast when set to SPD (DDR-400) timings at 200FSB, comfortably beating the Canterwood into second place. Secondly, it's an FSB monster. 285FSB came and went with utter stability; a testament to Intel's impressive engineering prowess. Fast and relatively inexpensive, just how we like it. Recommended.

Ever since Intel unveiled their first P4 DDR platform in mid-December of 2001 its been clear that while single-channel DDR solutions could provide the P4 with a solid cost-effective platform, only one channel of memory was never going to unlock the CPU's full potential—or enable the DDR chipsets to surpass i850e in overall performance.

As part of its plan to phase out RDRAM and use only DDR chipsets from high-end servers to budget-oriented desktops, Intel introduced the long-awaited E7205 and E7505 chipsets late last year. E7205 (Granite Bay) was oriented towards the high-end desktop / workstation market, while E7505 was a full server board. E7205 brought Intel's DDR performance to either just ahead or just behind RDRAM's (depending on the review you read) but the chipset didn't see that many adopters due to its fairly expensive price and the launch of Canterwood not too far off in the distance.

This morning our man from the west coast, Chris Angelini, checks in with the next big thing from Intel. This time around he reviewed the D865GBF 865G motherboard based on the Springdalechipset. Click the link below for the full details and to see if Intel hit another one out of the ball park.

In our experience, the 2.8-GHz P4 is the best choice: it costs less than $300 and offers excellent overclocking potential. And MSI has developed a logic circuit to enable and implement dynamic overclocking.