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 Intel i815e.The second chipset of our comparison, the Intel i815e is somewhat interesting for a number of reasons. The first reason surrounds its place in the Intel chipset strategy. If Intel had achieved its aims in late 1999, the predominant chipset for the Pentium III would have been the Rambus RDRAM compatible i820, with the low-end i810 family looking after the Celeron range in low cost PCs. As Intel’s chipset strategy was beginning to falter with the market’s rejection of the i820, it was left with only the ageing and increasingly obsolete i440BX and low-end i810 to make up the bulk of its sales. Thus Intel had left its chipset strategy with a large gap; a 133 MHz FSB chipset with support for AGP 4X for high-end Pentium III systems. This would not have been too bad for Intel if it was not for ascendent chipset manufacturer VIA exploiting this gap with the Apollo Pro133A. Intel found that it needed a credible 133 MHz FSB chipset with AGP 4X support fast. The second interesting area of the i815 was how Intel developed the low-end i810 line into a credible mid-range to high-end chipset. It was well known that the integrated i810 line of chipsets offered good memory performance coupled to high levels of stability, their only shortcoming being the lack of a dedicated AGP 4X slot. Thus Intel developed the i815e from the i810 range by adding AGP 4X and support for PC-133 SDRAM (the i810e supported 133 MHz FSB Pentium IIIs but o nly with PC-100 SDRAM), and other features. The third reason is that the i815e chipset follows a different architecture compared to the other VIA chipset’s featured in this comparison. Chipset Design.As the i815e was based upon the i810 family of chipsets, it follows a different architecture to earlier Intel chipsets such as the i440BX and the other VIA chipsets featured in this article. Instead of the familiar North and South Bridge controller design, the i815e uses Intel’s Accelerated Hub Architecture design which allows for the removal of the PCI bus as the main connection for the chipset. With the i815e devices such as the IDE controller can gain a direct connection to the chipset without having to pass through the PCI bus. Despite this new chipset design, the layout of i815e based motherboards follows the same two chip principles as designs which use the older North and South Bridge architecture. The principle chip at the core of the i815e is the i815 GMCH (Graphics, Memory Controller Hub) which looks after the CPU, main memory and the AGP 4X port, be it either the integrated i752 or whatever card is used in the AGP slot. The second chip used by the i815e is the ICH2 (Integrated Controller Hub 2) which looks after the PCI bus, E-IDE controller (in this case U/DMA 100 compatible) BIOS and Audio & Modem codecs. Like the Apollo Pro133A, the i815e features support for PC-133 SDRAM as well as older PC-66 and PC-100 SDRAM. There is no support for VC-SDRAM as there is with VIA based chipsets. The biggest drawback as concerns memory support with the i815e is the fact that it is limited to a maximum of only 512 MB main memory whereas the Apollo Pro133A can carry a maximum of 2 GB. Intel found that it had to limit the amount of memory which could be addressed by the i815e in order to accommodate the integrated i752 graphics controller.
Possibly the most distinctive feature of the i815e in this comparison is the presence of the integrated i752 graphics controller as part of the i815 GMCH. Whilst we
found from our AX3S Pro review, the i752 provides rather poor performance when compared to even three year old graphics controllers such as the Nvidia TnT, it
did offer the user a degree of flexibility if they were upgrading their motherboard as they could choose to wait until they are ready to purchase the graphics card of
their choice and in the meantime use the i752. We would not recommend the i752 for use by PC gamers, instead we would recommend that the dedicated AGP
4X slot be used to run a more modern graphics accelerator.
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