A few new technologies are eliminating some of the bottlenecks in memory and motherboard performance.Vendors often send us new "toys" to play with at the Labs--products that they are particularly proud or excited about. We received a couple of items late this month that the other guys in the Lab graciously conceded to let me play with: Kingston's new HyperX 512MB memory module and an Intel D875PBZ motherboard with processor.
And their respective claims to fame?
Let's start with the memory module. It has sexy blue aluminium heatsinks over the chips but the reason for this is that the module claims a pretty impressive speed rating of DDR 434MHz; or, put it another way, PC3500. Now before you get too excited with the overall system performance possibilities offered by blazingly fast memory, bear in mind your motherboard has to at the very least support some fairly impressive memory overclocking options (which many do not). And to make matters worse, if a motherboard was designed for DDR 266MHz memory, for example, the memory bus may well be limited to this speed.
The D875PBZ has a couple of notable features. The first is that it supports Intel's new 800MHz FSB P4 processor and indeed was fitted with a 3GHz P4 with the faster FSB, and while the motherboard also supports 533MHz FSB CPUs it no longer supports the older 400MHz FSB. The second interesting feature is the integrated Gigabit network interface. You may well say, so what? We've had Gigabit for a while now. But many have reported rather poor performance though this has not been the fault
| Reported poor Gigabit performance has not been the fault of Gigabit technology but rather is the result of a botttleneck in the chipsets that never allowed it to reach its potential. |
It's probably worth exploring at this point just what is going on in the new 875P chipset and taking a peek at the relative memory bandwidths. The AGP is finally a 8x bus with a 2GBps pipe to the MCH. As mentioned, the Gigabit LAN has its own 266MBps bus, the dual channel DDR memory (RDRAM going, going . . . almost gone) has a fat 6.4GBps pipe to the MCH, and finally the CPU itself receives all the data via the MCH at an identical 6.4GBps. It's interesting to note that the motherboard only supports DDR 400 memory when you are using an 800MHz FSB processor, which makes good sense, and interestingly DDR 333 memory is actually throttled back to 320MHz when using an 800MHz FSB CPU to minimise latencies.
The ICH (I/O Controller Hub), in this case an 82801EB, has two 150MBps Serial ATA channels, a pair of ATA-100 channels running at, you guessed it, 100MBps each, and five PCI slots sharing a 133MBps bus, which is starting to look a little thin--this leaves the eight USB 2.0 ports that have a single 60MBps bus. You will note that you would not want to put too many high-bandwidth USB 2 devices on the motherboard as there is not enough bandwidth to run two devices flat chat, let alone eight.
I have not yet had a chance to fully explore the performance of the board and memory but as a teaser until next month just let me say the Serial ATA with a pair of RAID 0 Seagate hard drives and dual memory modules configured to just 400MHz produces some incredible performance.
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