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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: 6.4 GB and Now What? Separating the DMAs Solving Speed Issues Performance Acceleration Technology A few new Silicons Bonanza Test Setup Memory Performance RAID performance I RAID performance II Winstones 3D Gaming OpenGL / CAD Conclusion Your comments? Intel Mainboards Online
Intel i875 - Canterwood    SATA and GbE for PAT
(Review by MS, April 14, 2003)

After a week of testing and reinstalling WindowsXP about three dozen times under different conditions for the different RAID setups or graphics adapters used, this review is finally ready to be wrapped up. In retrospect, I think it is fair to say that the main focus of attention before receiving the actual test bed had been on the 800 MHz FSB and there is certainly something to that. Some applications show an increase in performance but there are also some that don't. Most gaming applications do show an improvement with the higher performance, that is for sure.

On the other hand, there is only so much that can be gained from an increase in FSB / memory frequency, keep in mind that using the 800 MHz metric as basis, we are back again in the days of the PII 350, meaning that we are looking at an effective multiplier of roughly 3.75 (15/4). In so far, we are looking at the 3.0 GHz processor almost as a starting point for higher speed grades. For the immediate future, though, Intel will be going the opposite way, targeting the budget market rather than the high-end. We will have more on that story when the time comes. Suffice it to say that the switches are set for even higher FSB speeds, the hardware and self-tuning capabilities are in place and just waiting for the curtain to fall. DDR-I 533 all of a sudden looks much more realistic than it did only a few weeks ago.

Overall, the biggest assets of the new platform appear to be the ICH5 and the CSA implementation, which makes the new genre of board a perfect playground for networking of workstations with transfers of large files across the network. The SATA RAID capabilities of the new controller are certainly blowing away all expectations / reservations and the separate bus architecture for the I/O Hub Link and the Gigabit Ethernet provide a very efficient way for streaming transfer of data from the drive to the network and back.

The same architecture, as far as we know, will be implemented in the more budget- oriented versions to come. Arguably, from a CSA standpoint, Gigabit Ethernet does not make too much sense without SATA RAID, vice versa, it is not quite the same but still a similar situation. In view of the I/O performance we have shown, a final thought is, where SCSI going to be in the near future. Parallel ATA never reached SCSI performance but with SATA RAID, the story could change very quickly, definitely with the next generation of SATA and the introduction of Native Command Queuing.

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