The Pentium 4’s increasing number of chipsets has allowed the CPU to spread into an ever-increasing number of markets, from the high-end, workstation oriented E7205 (Granite Bay) to the ultra-budget, bottom-end i845GV.  The i845PE chipset we’ll be examining today strikes a balance between the needs of a high-end user while offering consumers a full-featured, cost-effective platform. 

Features of the i845PE Platform:

Support for Intel’s 533 MHz and 400 MHz Bus:  Both Intel’s original 400 MHz FSB CPU’s and the newer 533 MHz bus CPU’s are supported.  Even though Intel will soon unveil an 800 MHz FSB P4, 533 MHz CPU’s are not set for immediate termination and will still be prevalent into the second and possibly even third quarter of this year.

Single-Channel DDR RAM:  While a single-channel DDR solution doesn’t provide as much bandwidth as dual RDRAM or dual-channel Granite Bay, i845PE boards are half the cost (or less) of Granite Bay boards, and typically carry more integrated features than an RDRAM board.  While a single-channel DDR solution cannot provide the P4 with all the memory bandwidth the CPU is theoretically capable of using, the i845PE lags its dual-channel cousins by as little as 1% to up to 10% depending on the benchmark being run.  Many tests that are CPU intensive will show no effective difference between the two.

Supports both DDR 333 and DDR 266:  Unlike the i845E platform which supported only DDR266, i845PE supports the newer DDR333 standard as well, with the subsequent jump in performance expected. 

AGP 4x Interface:  Although AGP 8X cards are now available (and companies are pushing 8x designs for all they’re worth) the fact that the PE doesn’t support AGP 8x isn’t as much of a problem as it might seen.  The fact is that there are few-to-no programs or games that take advantage of the higher bandwidth AGP 8x provides, and games that do so are not close on the horizon.  Consumers who are still concerned about this could always purchase an AGP 8x card and run it in a 4x slot with no problems.

Integrated USB 2.0:  The last major feature on the i845PE (and one that’s becoming increasingly important as peripherals that use it become more widespread) is USB 2.0.  Integration of this feature into the chipset is standard on almost every motherboard chipset built today.

TWO OR THREE DIMMS?

One of the differences between the various i845PE boards is that some only use two DIMMs, while some offer a 3 DIMM configuration.  This was once a bigger deal when the price of high-density memory was much higher?a 256 meg DIMM might cost 20-30% more than two sticks of 128 Meg RAM, which encouraged users to buy motherboards with as many slots as possible and save their money.  Today, however, even 512 meg sticks of DDR sell for nearly the same cost as two sticks of 256, making higher RAM densities much more economical. 

The other “advantage” to two DIMM boards (if you care to call it that) is that the i845PE chipset only supports up to four banks of DDR memory, whether two or three slots are used.  2 DIMM boards will never run into a problem here, as its impossible to exceed the 4-bank limitation using only two DIMMs, but users attempting to use all three DIMM slots could conceivably own a configuration of DDR that would exceed this limitation.  Based on these facts we no longer feel 2 DIMM slots is the significant negative it once was, but whether you’re after two DIMM boards or three, you’ve got a solid selection to choose from here.

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• Aopen AX4PE MAX (0 of 7)
• ASUS P4PE (0 of 7)
• Chaintech 9EJS1 (0 of 7)
• Gigabyte PE667 Ultra2 (0 of 7)
• MSI 845PE Max2 (0 of 7)
• Performance (0 of 7)
• Conclusion (0 of 7)