Onboard Features



In the last roundup, we had a virtual draw. This time around, I've got to hand it to the 875P and the 800 FSB P4 parts. The benchmarks show it. Furthermore, and to some of you, more importantly, the 875P/P4 has too many 'intangibles'....kick-butt stuff that doesn't show up in benchmarks.

CSA Lan:

The Athlon/nForce2 doesn't have an answer for this. CSA Gigabit LAN hauls butt, but even better, it's got it's own dedicated bus. You do not have to worry about flooding your PCI bus with CSA Lan anymore. You can get Gigabit with the AMD setup, but it will be on the PCI bus.
This feature isn't all that important to me, nor the majority of home users, but for those with pretty intense networking needs, this is a deal-breaker.

S-ATA performance:

ICH5/ICH5R: ICH5 supports two SATA ports natively....nForce2 does not. Furthermore, both those SATA ports, as well as the ATA100 ports, are no longer on the PCI bus either. Intel went out of it's way to clear up some bottlenecks, and it shows. Lastly, the ICH5R version supports RAID 0 (and in the future, RAID 1). Here's the thing...each of those SATA channels is it's own bus. That's right, combined together, it's 300MB/sec of potential (well, 266MB/sec is the limit of the bus, but it's not like we'll be there any time soon):



That's a pair of 10k SATA Raptors, folks...on the onboard SI controller with the nForce2, on the ICH5R controller with the 875P. Note that PCI limit for the nForce2's buffered read. Then note that better-than-single-channel-SATA150 161MB/sec the ICH5R puts out...all the while not being on the PCI bus.

Good stuff.
A last look at HyperThreading ->