Intel 845 Chipset Review & Motherboard Roundup: September 2001

Final Words

Delivering on what the market has requested, Intel's 845 chipset is finally here.  It is only a shame that there will not be a DDR version sooner as it would be a very strong performer judging from the enhancements Intel made to the 845's MCH.  Unlike most manufacturers which shipped 845 motherboards earlier than Intel allowed them to, we'd be very surprised to see a motherboard manufacturer actually ship a DDR 845 motherboard without Intel's blessing.

If you've been following the news you've undoubtedly heard that VIA will be filing suit with the claims that Intel's 845 chipset infringes on VIA patents, thus stealing some of the spotlight on Intel's launch of the 845 chipset.  This is definitely a very gutsy move from VIA but don’t lose sight of their goal with this; VIA's only intention is to produce the P4X266 and P4M266 in peace without threats from Intel and without undue pressures on motherboard manufacturers.

While some still refuse to touch either manufacturer with a 10 ft poll, ALi and SiS will also be entering the Pentium 4 chipset market in the near future as well.  And it is no surprise that there are many who realize the performance of NVIDIA's nForce solution will never be at its peak on the Athlon platform, only the Pentium 4 could use more than half of its memory bandwidth.  This leaves ATI and even Intel themselves as the only two we haven't seen next-generation solutions from.  ATI is supposed to have an integrated R200/RV200 core into their next chipset and Intel has had designs ready for a dual channel DDR chipset of their own for quite a while now.  It looks like competition in the Pentium 4 chipset market is going to start heating up over the coming year.

With that said about the future of the Pentium 4 chipset market let's look at the present day i845 motherboards we just looked at.  Crowning a winner is difficult since so many of the motherboards were very much alike. 

We could crown one based on performance in which case the QDI PlatiniX 2 would come away with the gold since it was the highest performing in all of our tests; but then again the second highest board was barely outperformed because they all scored within a very close range. 

We could crown a winner based on stability but with the exception of the Chaintech boards, we didn't have a single problem with any of the motherboards.  They all worked perfectly fine with all SDRAM DIMM slots occupied during our testing. 

The only real differentiation factor that exists is how far we could overclock the solutions, that being an indicator of how well made the motherboard was.  The ASUS P4B was able to run its FSB at 170MHz reliably in our tests while other boards, with the exact same components, couldn't break 160MHz.  Because of this, combined with the fact that the board has every other feature you could possibly want the ASUS P4B walks away with our Editors Choice award for best Pentium 4 i845 Motherboard.

Honorable mentions go to Gigabyte for the tweaking/overclocking options in their BIOS, and ABIT/MSI for another pair of solid solutions for those of you that absolutely must have IDE RAID.