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Riding the wave of the latest Intel chipsets, Iwill is coming out with the P4HT, a somewhat unusual board in more than one aspect. Unusual in this case refers to the color scheme, meaning that the board is featuring a red PCB, red expansion slots, red connectors and a blue LED fan for the North Bridge. An additional oddity is the USB port sticking out from the center of the mainboard. In terms of quality, stability and performance, the P4HT can compete with the best. We did find some interesting performance issues with regard to the memory configuration, though, moreover, we have some ideas what's behind it.

In the last year, Intel must have released more chipsets than in the five years before. Of course, our somewhat cynical point of view is that in the days of the BX chipset, there was no need to force one variation of a proven concept after the other; the profanity of this behavior was suitable for the competition but not for Intel where the marching order was: "If it ain't broken, don't fix it". So what is it that the different iterations of the i845 chipset are telling us? Is it room for improvement or is it just the naming convention game, that is, a new stepping every three months which then deserves a new suffix. Well, anybody who knows me also knows that I hate playing devil's advocate and no, I am not the Pope either .....

Even for the inaugurated, it has become somewhat difficult to follow the trail of Intel chipsets, as there are the i845, the i845D, E, G or P and combinations thereof, and if they keep doing this to us we are going to end up with an XXX version before running out of alphanumerical suffixes by the end of next year. For our venerable readership, the best thing to do is probably to list the most common versions in one table and offer the information at one glance to avoid confusion.

Chipset	i845	i845D	i845G	i845GL	i845GE	i845GV	i845E	i845PE
Memory	PC100/133 SDRAM	DDR200/266	PC133, DDR200/266	PC133, DDR200/266	DDR266/333	PC133, DDR200/266	DDR200/266	DDR266/333
Memory Banks	6	4	6/4	6/4	4	6/4	4	4
Max Open Pages	24	16	24 / 16	24 / 16	16	24 / 16	16	16
Integrated Graphics	no	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	no
AGP Slot	4X	4X	4X	n/a	4X	n/a	4X	4X

What is obvious from the above is that the differences are mostly in the presence or absence of the integrated Intel Extreme Graphics or likewise, the question of whether an additional AGP 4X slot is available to bypass the integrated graphics. The other main difference concerns the official condoning of DDR333 a.k.a. PC2700 at the expense of leaving out the SDRAM support. Things take their time at Intel, though, and very often, features that nobody at Intel would talk about are buried within the chipset only to be discovered and consequently unlocked by the mainboard industry. This, of course, circumvents the rearing of the ugly medusa called validation because if anything goes wrong, Intel didn't do it.

On the other hand, this does not mean that the chipsets haven't gone through refinement over the course of different die revisions. There is certainly a reason for the latest steppings to deserve a different name, otherwise, everybody would be scraping off the white goop from the NorthBridge, er, MCH to find out which revision of chipset he or she unknowingly acquired, don't we know all about it?

Enough of preamble here, today's story is not whether Intel is playing a numbers game but what can be done with the hardware at hand, that is, the IWill P4HT, based on the Intel i845PE chipset but without the -S for SATA.

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