Intel's new 845 chipsets

The 845G chipset, aimed chiefly at mid-range PCs, can support either integrated graphics or an external AGP card.

What's old, what's new

Thanks to support for the top-speed 533MHz frontside bus (FSB) in addition to the existing 400MHz FSB, the 845E can run both the older Pentium 4 processors as well as the new 533MHz FSB-capable 2.26GHz, 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz chips that were announced with the RDRAM-based 850E chipset. The 845E officially supports only 200MHz and 266MHz DDR SDRAM, however -- a disappointment because 333MHz DDR is becoming widely available.

The 845G chipset will serve the low to mid-range market segments. It supports the slower 266MHz DDR SDRAM and 133MHz SDRAM memory types, and it offers integrated graphics, dynamically allocating up to 48MB of system memory for use in the display subsystem (rising to 64MB with the new Extreme Graphics Driver 11.1, available in June). Motherboards using this chipset will also provide AGP slots for discrete graphics cards.

What's borrowed: graphics memory

Systems based on the 845GL are limited to a 400MHz FSB (and thus older Pentium 4 or the new 400MHz FSB Celeron CPUs) and the choice of using either 133MHz SDRAM or 200/266MHz DDR SDRAM. The 845GL's memory-dependent (up to 48MB) graphics will slow gaming/3D performance to a crawl, but that's typical for the low-end and corporate systems in which this chipset will reside. The 845GL will eventually replace the 810 and 815 chipsets currently common in this segment.

What makes us blue

Because the different 845 chipset flavours vary so widely in their capabilities, they're certain to confuse all but the most technically-knowledgeable users. All means that buyers are going to have to pay a little more attention to specifications. Furthermore, the jump to 1.7GHz and a 400MHz FSB for the Celeron means that its speed overlaps with that of low-end 1.6GHz Pentium 4 systems.

At the high end, 845E-based systems with DDR SDRAM put pressure on 850E-based competitors with RDRAM because the latter are limited to PC800 (rather than PC1066) memory. We do see the expected 30 percent gap between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM in memory subsystem performance, but it doesn't (and probably won't) translate into significantly faster application performance -- even in CPU and memory-intensive MPEG-2-encoding tests, RDRAM-based systems are, at most, 10 percent faster than DDR SDRAM-based systems.

What's slow: integrated graphics

In addition to confusing buyers, the 845's contribution to integrated graphics is dubious. Application scores remain in the same ballpark as, say, systems using an nVidia TNT2 64 card. However, with the 845G/GL chip you lose up to 48MB of your system memory to graphics, rendering games unplayable. We couldn't run 3DMark2001 Pro (which tests DirectX 8 performance) on any integrated-graphics system, while Quake III performance leaped from around a useless 10fps for 810-based systems to a still-dismal 16fps with the 845G/GL. One thing at least is clear: never buy a system with integrated graphics if you want decent games performance.

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