Item: Intel i875P Canterwood
Author: Tarinder Sandhu

Conclusion

Let's get one thing out of the way first. The Canterwood chipset, when run at its optimum combination of 200FSB CPU and DDR-400 dual channel memory, is the fastest motherboard currently available for S478 CPUs. Many enthusiasts may have been blinded into thinking that the only way to extract greater and greater performance is to raise the CPU's speed higher and higher. Sure, faster CPUs do help, but as the Canterwood has shown, you can run a slower CPU and still top almost every benchmark. The ability to transfer information to and from the CPU is as paramount as the CPU's speed itself. Increasing the transfer speed, courtesy of a 6.4GB/s memory bus and MCH, allows one to saturate the quad-pumped P4 CPU to a greater degree.

Where the XP3000+ took the lead in some of the benchmarks before the introduction of the Canterwood, the latter now steals a benchmark lead that's hard to ignore; all that with a slower P4 (in clock terms. 3GHz vs. 3.06GHz). The 50% rise in FSB seems to have paid off.

Having said that, the Canterwood is a strange animal. With Intel's PAT technology (Performance Acceleration Technology) present in this chipset, a technology that should help reduce the latencies and increase the overall transfer speed from CPU to system memory and vice-versa, it's a little mystifying as to why it was, on occasion, a little slower than a Granite-Bay motherboard when run with the same CPU. Sure, the memory timings were a little more relaxed, but I'd have thought that the PAT technology would have overcome this deficit. Incidentally, turning off PAT did slow the Canterwood down just a tad in memory-dependant benchmarks.

Performance, though, was always going to be good, even with semi-relaxed timings. Anyone who's run a Granite-Bay motherboard at high FSBs knows just what kind of performance advantage it brings. The Canterwood is more than just a faster motherboard. Removing potential bottlenecks seems to be a key aim. The fifth-generation Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller now finds itself linked directly to the MCH via a 266MB/s link (~ 2.1 Gbps), thereby affording full-duplex connection without the saturating the under-equipped 32-bit/33MHz PCI bus. With RAID arrays becoming faster and faster, and many home users networking a number of PCs, the need for a dedicated, fast connection is rising all the time.

Speaking of RAID. Intel have dealt discrete RAID controllers a small blow by integrating RAID0 into the ICH5 ER Southbridge. It's fairly easy to setup and maintain. thanks to the easy-to-use Intel RAID program. It's just a shame, then, that whilst Intel have expanded the number of high-speed USB2.0 ports to 8, Firewire, another widely-used high-speed standard, doesn't figure in the ICH5. Add-on MACs and PHYs don't cost the earth, but as NVIDIA have shown, you can have it all. There was talk of integrated Wi-Fi. It seems as if it was just that; there's no indication of it in the ICH5.

The Canterwood, in summary, gives the P4 a definitive performance advantage of its arch-rival. It's also both faster and more feature rich than the present Granite-Bay motherboard. High performance has never been so easy to obtain, albeit at some cost. The pricing of retail Canterwood boards isn't yet known, but we hope that with 4-layer construction the price isn't on the wrong side of £150. Expect them to ship soon, as should a number of 200FSB P4s.

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