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Prices: CPU Intel P4 2.4C-800 P4 2.6C-800 P4 2.8C-800 P4 3.0-800 P4 3.2-800 AMD AthlonXP XP 1700+ XP 2000+ XP 2400+ XP 2500+ XP 2700+ XP 3000+ XP 3200+ Athlon64 Athlon64 3200+ Athlon64 FX-51 Opteron Opteron 240 Opteron 242 Opteron 244 Opteron 246 Memory Corsair Crucial Kingston Mushkin OCZ |
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| P4 2.0 GHz Platform Production Boards i845, i850, VIA P4X266 | ||
| (Review by MS, 9/2001) |
Intel D850MD
Intel offers their own production board in two versions, that is as Micro ATX board (D850MD, tested here ) or as full ATX board (D850MV). The D850MD board tested here features three PCI slots in addition to the CNR and AGP interface as well as integrated LAN and audio. Based on the i850 dual channel Rambus, the memory interface delivers theoretically as much as 3.2 GB/sec bandwidth. Each channel runs at 800 MHz operating frequency on a 16 bit wide bus for a total of 1.6 GB/sec and channel. As mentioned earlier, the main issue with this design is that the CPU bus is 64 bit wide and, therefore, the 16bit packages need to be recombined to coherent 64 bit data before they can be furthered on to the CPU.
Intel's MicroATX i850 mainboard features a dual channel Rambus memory interface. The same board is available in full ATX form factor (D850MV).
As usual for an Intel production board, the BIOS is bare any feature to allow tweaking of the performance. Quality has never been an issue with Intel, so it is redundant to even go there.
Special thanks to Mushkin for the loan of 4 RIMMs with a combined total of 768 MB.
In terms of the power supply circuitry, whoever is used to the massive MOSFETs present on most other boards will search for those in vain. A novel Semtech tri-phase power regulator using the SC1205CS dual FET driver chips with a ramp time of 14 ns as interface also allows cut backs on the capacitors used for buffering of ripple currents. As a result, just a few small OSCON caps are necessary for evening out current irregularities.
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