When Intel launched their 875P Canterwood chipset, they expected the design to be adopted mainly in the workstation market.  865 Springdale with its lower performance, less-powerful feature set, and lower price was expected to be the board of choice for the mainstream and enthusiast markets.  Since Springdale still offered higher performance than i845PE (and a good feature set) it wasn’t as if buyers were being cheated by going for a Springdale alternative.

Contrary to what most people predicted, however, Canterwood has proven to be a very popular chipset.  Springdale has gained momentum with the discovery of how to engage Intel’s “Performance Acceleration Technology” on the board (giving it Canterwood-like performance in many cases), but Canterwood still remains a strong option for many people wanting a top-end Intel product.

Before reviewing the boards themselves there a number of important issues and factors to be considered, including RAM compatibility, feature sets, and Prescott support.  These are all significant factors for consideration when purchasing a Canterwood board, and we’d recommend you read through them.

Canterwood Features:

The following is a re-print from our initial Canterwood review, and discusses the basic features of the board:

Dual DDR400 Support:  As we’ve already discussed, 875P uses a dual-channel system that supports both DDR33 and DDR400.  This is significant as there were once doubts over whether or not Intel would support DDR400 (this was back when DDR-II appeared closer on the horizon then it does today).  Intel’s decision to throw their weight behind a formal DDR400 standard helps to ensure that memory manufacturers will design parts to both a high level of quality and compatibility, though to be fair we’ve seen some excellent DDR400 rolling out already from companies like Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin, and OCZ.

800 MHz System Bus:  One of Canterwood’s most-touted features is its support for the new Pentium 4 processors Intel is introducing on its 800 MHz FSB.  This latest jump puts the P4’s total FSB bandwidth at 6.4 Gb/s?six times what the Pentium 3 offered in its heyday only three years ago. 

Communications Streaming Architecture (CSA):  The advent of high-bandwidth interconnect systems like USB2 and FireWire combined with the increasing use of integrated LAN is creating bottlenecks in the PCI bus.  Intel’s Communication Streaming Architecture is intended as a solution to this problem.  By creating a direct link between the MCH and the 82547EL Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller, Intel has bypassed the PCI bus entirely, reducing PCI bandwidth usage while simultaneously increasing the average sustained speed of the LAN connection.

Integrated SATA (ICH5) / Integrated SATA RAID (ICH5R):  Although SATA technology has been appearing on motherboards for months, all of the motherboards to date, whether Intel or AMD-supporting, have used on-board 3rd party controllers.  Not only is Intel’s ICH5 the first southbridge to integrate SATA support, the ICH5R is the first version to add integrated SATA RAID as well.  With the popularity of RAID arrays rising as hard drive prices fall, Intel’s new support for the standard comes at a very opportune moment.  It’d also be nice to see more SATA drives on the market simply so that a feature motherboard manufacturers love to tout was actually useful to consumers.

Performance Accelerated Technology (PAT):  Intel’s PAT is a performance-enhancing system that will appear exclusively (at least for now) on 875P Canterwood motherboards, which will undergo the most extensive validation and testing to ensure they are of the highest quality.  PAT increases performance by optimizing memory access between the processor and system memory on systems running an 800 MHz FSB and using dual DDR400. 

 

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• RAM, Prescott Support (0 of 12)
• Benchmarks (0 of 12)
• Intel D875PBZ (0 of 12)
• Gigabyte 8KNXP (0 of 12)
• DFI LANPARTY Pro875 Motherboard (0 of 12)
• Chaintech 9CJS (0 of 12)
• Biostar P4TCA Pro (0 of 12)
• ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe (0 of 12)
• AOpen AX4C MAX (0 of 12)
• ABIT IC7-G (0 of 12)
• The Boards (0 of 12)
• Rankings, Conclusion (0 of 12)