Introduction.

Intel’s progress developing it’s chipset family has continued unabated throughout the past 12 months. Intel has now moved from the highly successful i845 line of chipsets to a new generation of designs being the new i865 and i875. As any reader of previous reviews will be aware, the i845 family of chipsets set an impressive benchmark from which other Intel chipsets can be compared against and Intel had the task of building upon an extremely solid foundation.

The i865 and i875 family of chipsets offer a significant enhancement over the i845 family in that they feature support for twin-bank memory operation. This technology gained favour last year with the introduction of the excellent Nforce 2 chipset from Nvidia (it did also exist with the original Nforce design of late 2001). The use of twin bank memory allows data to be split across two physical memory slots and results in faster read and write operations. To put it crudely, this of this as being similar to RAID Striping but working for memory access. It became quickly apparent that this technology yielded significant performance gains in every day operation and Intel wasted no time in incorporating this into chipsets for the Pentium 4.

Other enhancements also came along with the i865 and i875 family of chipsets such as support for Intel’s new 800 MHz Front Side Bus speed, DDR 400 Memory and USB 2.0 integrated into the chipset.

Whilst Intel aimed the i875 chipset at the high-end PC market, it made a more affordable version in the shape of the i865. The main difference being that it does not feature support for Intel’s new Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) found in the i875. This of course is the mass market Pentium 4 chipset destined to be found in the vast majority of PCs leaving the doors of most OEMs. That is not to say this is not a top-class chipset, if anything this review has found the i865 to be a very credible performer. If anything the i865 is establishing itself as the mainstream Pentium 4 chipset.

The board featured in this review is the second i865 motherboard we have reviewed to date and come in the form of the Epox EP-4PDA2+. When comparing this board to the Chaintech CT9-PJL1 “Summit” it is important to note that the EP-4PDA2+ is positioned very much as the high-end enthusiast’s board. So to see how this board fared, read on...

Specifications.