I850E Dead End?

I'm about to upgrade my PIII 440BX system. I have been trying to keep up on the tech and have decided to stay Intel instead of move to AMD. Looking at P4T-533 (Rimm4200) and P4 2.26 as soon as the price drops hit. Did I get the wrong tone from Tom's last articles that I850E is not a future proof route? Or does the DDR (SISxxx) route hold more promise? I want to get a board that I can keep throwing the next price-drop speed grade CPU into for next 2 years at least. Any thoughts apprciated.

I think you should wait for the SiS655. It'll have support Dual-Channel DDR333, which would equal 5.4GB/s of mem bandwidth. That's awesome, and since DDR RAM has lower latency than RDRAM, I think you got a winner. Plus DDR333 isn't expensive really.

It should be out Q4 2002 Q1 2003, more likely end of Q4 to early Q1. That's my guess. Well worth the wait IMO.

EDIT: SiS650 is changed to SiS655.

Finally, I get a capitalized title!! WOOT!! <P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Chuck232 on 07/27/02 11:33 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

SiS anounced they will be producing the 658 chipset at the end of THIS MONTH which will also support RDRAM, and has AGP 8x (for what that's worth), USB 2.0, and Firewire support. We will see if it outperforms the i850E.

SiS should also be releasing the 655 chipset with Dual Channel DDR support soon, other features the same as the 658.

<font color=blue>By now you're probably wishing you had ask more questions first!</font color=blue>

Oh, whoops. I'll edit that .

Finally, I get a capitalized title!! WOOT!!

I agree. If you need it now then get it now. There is always new stuff coming out.

I doubt Intel will keep the Northwood for anything except the Celeron after Prescott. Just look at what happened to the P3. Intel almost totally bandoned it. A P3 tualatin costs more than an equivalently performing P4 because Intel isn't mass producing.

<b><i>"A penny saved is a penny earned!"</i></b>

The good news is: which type of RAM a motherboard/chipset supports doesn't necessarily indicate which CPU slot/socket it has to support.

The bad news is: it's almost impossible to predict which socket/slot type Intel will be using in two years.

The best way to stay future proof is by buying the fastest thing available at the moment, but that can get expensive.

I JUST bought a mainboard using the 850E chipset. But I'm building myself an audio workstation so I HAD to stick with intel.

Otherwise I would have waited for the SiS chipset.

Why do you have to stick with Intel? If you don't, and you're interested in building a machine for Graphics/Gaming purposes then I'd say wait until SiS if only for the AGP8X. Nvidia will probably have cards available that use 8X in about 6 months to a year, plus some of the mainboards coming out will have the serial ATA options as well.

I think that those 2 things are important to keep in mind in terms of having that expandability under a single mainboard.

Plus DDR handles overclocking really well, so you always have that option. Whereas the RDRAM is very touchy about it and is difficult to overclock.

I won't have to upgrade my audio workstation after a P4 for YEARS, so that's why I'm going with it. That and the fact that I am forced to use Intel for combatibility reasons with my pro audio hardware.