Board Features I
A look at the board itself, more as a pictorial description of the features and how they work in the context of the board.
The huge passive heatsink on the i875 MCH dominates your attention. Expect all retail Canterwood-based motherboards to feature similar offerings. Running at a default 200MHz FSB is a 50% FSB leap over previous Intel motherboards. Perhaps the huge dissipation area is necessary. The retention bracket is strewn with high-quality components; again a must for super-high frequency operation.
The DIMM slots can work in either single or dual channel configuration, but running single channel memory is against the ethos of these boards. Running dual channel memory requires a few qualifications. You see 2 Kingmax PC3200 modules providing dual channel support above. DIMMs need to be matched in density (size), DRAM technology and bus width (this is uniform these days). They also have to be matched in layout; either both single or double-sided DIMMs. Although not a requisite, you'd be best off buying two identical modules from a retailer, thereby guaranteeing compatibility. Two DIMMs next to each other would not make up a dual channel pairing, unless you have all four slots filled with matched memory. The initial BIOS boot-up screen will inform you whether you are in single of dual channel mode.
Intel's fifth-generation 82547EI Gigabit Ethernet controller offers full-duplex operation with the dedicated 266MB/s Communication Streaming Architecture link to the MCH, ensuring that the PCI bus doesn't become swamped with data requests, as is the case with standard Gigabit layouts. It's difficult to accurately test the advantages of a dedicated link over a standard PCI layout in a home PC environment. The theoretical advantages are all too clear, though. We'll be looking into benchmarking the Gigabit controller in a forthcoming review that looks at the initial batch of Canterwood boards from big-name manufacturers.
The reference nature of this motherboard reveals itself with no audio routing to the backplane. Indeed, the probable PCB location of the sound CODEC is silk-screened. Analog Devices' impressive SoundMax AD198x series of CODECs have already found their way on to a couple of forthcoming retail Canterwood boards. We're fed 6 out of a possible 8 USB2.0 ports, as well as the Gigabit connection jack. It's a shame, though, that Firewire wasn't integrated into the ICH5/R. I know of a number of digital video camera users that would have appreciated it. Add-on controllers aren't expensive, but why clutter-up a board ?.
