D945GTP
Intel provided us with a reference i945G chipset-based mainboard that's worthy of a brief look. It will be dressed up in retail form and released to the general public. It's also how I expect a number of i945G boards to be laid out in retail form.
Note the micro-ATX form factor. With integrated graphics already in place, it's designed to fit into midrange systems from the likes of Dell. Expect to see a 945G derivative in a Dimension desktop in the near future, housed in a micro-ATX-sized case. The huge northbridge heatsink is, thankfully, unadorned by a noisy fan. That makes implicit sense, as i945G systems are designed to be deployed, often in their hundreds, in open workplaces.
As per Intel's PCI-Express thinking, there's only a single PATA port on the D945GTP board. 4 DIMM slots will also be the norm, offering dual-channel memory access with up to 4GB of non-ECC system RAM.
In this case, the ICH7R is paired up with the 82945G northbridge. I hope that most board partners do the same. NCQ and RAID attributes are worth the few dollars extra the ICH7R costs over the basic ICH7. These 4 SATA ports can be combined for esoteric RAID arrays through Intel's easy-to-use software.
The form factor allows for only 2 PCI and a single x1 PCI-Express lane. That will be enough for most users' needs. If not, full-size i945G-based boards will be available for a slight price premium. Depending upon the CODEC used, there's either 6- or 8-channel sound from the ICH7R's Azalia audio. Here, Intel has gone with Sigmatel's 8-channel 9223 CODEC. More choices will have to be made over whether i945G boards run with 10/100 or Gigabit LAN. Our sample shipped with a 10/100 transceiver.
4 USB2.0 ports are integrated on the I/O section and another 4 are available via board headers. The VGA port obviously runs from the GMA 950. Let's now see how it performs.
