THG's I845 Test Platform

Unfortunately we cannot disclose who made our i845/SDR platform, but the manufacturer will know and I'd like to take the chance and congratulate him and of course Intel for providing an extremely stable and reliable chipset/motherboard combination. It was also a good proof for the fact that this board is ready to ship and not much of a pre-release board anymore. We ran our fastest PC133 SDRAM in it and adjusted the memory settings to 2-2-2-5/7 to squeeze the last bit of performance out of it. The motherboard happened to be a typical i845-solution with the upcoming Socket478, which will soon replace the current Socket423. The new socket is much smaller than the current Pentium 4 socket and it requires different heat sinks as well. Socket478 will be able to host the next-generation Pentium 4 with 'Northwood' core, which will be introduced in a few months at speeds of 1.9 and 2.0 GHz. Owners of the older Pentium 4 version for Socket423 might find a few transitional i845-motherboards that host their old processors, but those boards won't come with any upgrade paths for the new Northwood Pentium 4 processors anymore.

The north bridge of i845 reminds of Pentium III and requires a heat sink for proper operation. It hosts the Pentium 4 interface, the AGP-controller, capable of 4xAGP and the SDRAM/DDR-SDRAM memory controller. It is connected to the south bridge via the well-known 8-line hub-architecture link that's running at 266 MHz.