latest chipset

[raylee011]

I haven't touch any computer stuff for a while. Can some one tell me what is in the market right now. The last time I thing that I remember about is the 815, 820 stuffs. What is after that, and some information about each.

 

[jlanka]

last time I thing that I remember about is the 815, 820 stuffs. What is after that

Well, I guess after that would be 821, 822, 823... and so on.

hehehehe :tongue:

I think I had too much to drink last night or something?

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>

 

[dmcmahon]

You can read about this by looking back at the last few articles Tom has written. In brief:

Intel's 815e is still the mainstream chipset for Intel P3 systems. The P4 is supported by Intel's 840 chipset, which only works with RDRAM. The 845 will be out in a few months, and will support P4s with PC133 SDRAM. A future revision of the 845 will support PC2100 (133 DDR) SDRAM, but this is not expected out until early 2002.

Other chipset makers, most notably VIA, make chipsets for the P3 and are going to bring DDR support for P4s out much sooner. Sorry, I'm not up on the details of these because frankly if I were going to buy an Intel CPU, I'd buy an Intel chipset and probably even an Intel mobo.

In the AMD camp, there is quite a bit of turbulence. Starting with VIA, their mainstream chipset was the KT133A, which supports Athlon/Duron processors and PC133 SDRAM. This chipset is quite common, though there are persistent rumors of stability issues. VIA also has a DDR chipset for the Athlon, sorry, I don't know the number because again frankly I would look elsewhere for DDR support at this point.

AMD's reference chipset for the Athlon is the 761, this chipset supports PC2100 SDRAM and is supposed to be the most stable, and a top performer. The main problems with AMD's chips are (1) low availability and (2) board makers most commonly team the 761 northbridge with the buggy VIA 686B southbridge (the same southbridge you'd get with the KT133A chipset). It's rare to find a board that uses AMD's southbridge (the 766).

ALI makes a DDR AMD chipset too but I don't know the model number, all reviews I've read show that it's inferior to the AMD set so I haven't looked further.

Recently there has been a lot of excitement in the AMD market with the entrance of graphics king Nvidia. They have announced their new nForce chipset and there's a lot of buzz. This chipset will be out later this year and has many advanced architectural features, as well as integrated on-board GF2MX graphics and high-end sound. If I were buying another AMD system I would definitely wait for these products to come out, then make a decision based on stability and compatibility.

There is also a lot of interest in the latest chipset introduced by SIS, which has long been making chipsets for AMD but has been regarded as a lower-end player. They have recently announced a new single-chip solution (I think the number is 735) that combines the northbridge and southbridge. Early benchmarks show it to be a good performer. There is no buzz on stability, though. I've learned a hard lesson in the AMD world, and that is that you've got to have stability and compatibility first, performance second.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by dmcmahon on 06/13/01 08:46 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[BGates2B]

On the Intel camp, you listed the 840 as the chipset for the Pentium 4. It is actually the 850 (the 840 was used for Pentium !!!). The 845 chipset will be coming out towards the end of summer and will allow SDRAM and DDR support for the Pentium 4. The P4 is the one chip out there that really takes advantage of the increased bandwith offered in RAMBUS and DDR. However, the current P4 has a limited life span with a new 478 pin socket coming up for the upcoming Northwood. The 815E chipset has a new B-stepping for the upcoming Tualatin Pentium 3. This is mainly a revision to allow for the lower core voltage needed for these 0.13 micron P3's.

The AMD camp, the AMD 761 is the best DDR chipset (IMHO). The Acer Labs' chipset is also good (it is called Magik1) but there has been some compatibility problems with the Magik chipset and ATi cards, the Radeon and Rage 128 in particular. Via has their KT133A for the SDRAM crowd and the KT266 chipset for the DDR crowd.