Introduction
We have heard a little about the latest Intel chipset, E7205 or Granite Bay, here at Hexus over the past couple of months. We were able to review development samples from MSI and DFI, both less well know manufacturers. Today we take a close look at one of the first full production Granite Bay motherboards to hit the high street the Asus P4G8X Deluxe. Asus are a giant in the world of motherboards so hopefully we will see this Intel chipset utilised fully.The Granite Bay chipset is designed for use in high end workstations, computers where data needs to be transferred around the system as quickly as possible. This is particularly vital if you are working with CAD or 3D modelling. Although the Granite Bay chipset has some features that will improve performance it is probably only aimed at the high end market because the production costs are high. If and when production costs reduce the benefits offered by Granite Bay will prove useful in computers used for any task including computer gaming.
The major benefits of Granite Bay:
- Dual DDR memory – enabling a theoretical memory bandwidth of 4.2 Gigabits per second. In simple terms twice as fast as equivalent single DDR chipsets!
- Enables Hyper-threading (if you have a P4 3.06 or above)
- Supports 8xAGP
When we reviewed the DFI NB80-EA motherboard we found that its performance was just shy of the Asus P4T with its 4200 rambus memory. Lets see it the latest Asus can better the performance of the DFI.
