The new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4 processors are well established now and are available at a number of clock speeds. There is also a wide range of chipsets that already support these new P4 processors some of which I have already looked at. Motherboard manufacturers have been quick to offer support for the 800MHz FSB P4 processors with a wide range of motherboards featuring these new chipsets. The most recent 800MHz FSB supportive chipset to enter the market was developed by VIA technologies. Codenamed PT800, this single channel DDR chipset provided excellent performance at an excellent price. Unfortunately, we are still yet to see any motherboards based around the PT800 chipset. Therefore users are left with Intels chipsets as the only possible solution at the moment. Fortunately, there are a large amount of motherboards based on the new Intel i875P & i865PE chipsets. This review is going to be looking at four motherboards based on these new Intel Dual-Channel DDR chipsets. Two of which will be based on the high performance i875P chipset and the other two on the slightly more affordable i865PE chipset. The selected motherboard manufacturers are ASUS and Gigabyte. They have both provided one motherboard based on each of these new Intel chipsets. Before I begin examining each board individually I will quickly go over some information regarding the chipsets.

The Canterwood (875P) chipset officially supports Dual-Channel DDR400 offering a total memory bandwidth of 6.4GB/s. Combine this with the 800MHz FSB processor support and you have a total of 6.4GB/s working between the processor and the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem also has a special tweaked technology turbo mode which Intel calls Performance Acceleration Technology or PAT. This is a similar marketing scheme to VIAs FastStream64 technology used on the new KT400A chipset.

The two new Intel chipsets that have been recently released supporting DC DDR400 go by the codenames Springdale (i865PE) and Canterwood (i875P). The Canterwood series, for now, consists of just the 875P chipset and is now Intels flagship product replacing the i850E chipset. The Springdale series however, consists of three core products being the 865-P, 865-PE and 865-G. The 865-PE and 865-G are quite similar supporting the same processors and memory types. The key difference however, lies within the integrated graphics of the 865-G chipset. The 865-P is more of a budget option supporting just 400/533MHz FSB processors and Dual-Channel DDR266/333.

These new chipsets will not only break the 800MHz FSB P4 processors but it will also push Serial ATA into the market. The 875P chipset does this through the ICH5 south bridge which is a very important element of this chipset. Its worth noting that not only does the ICH5 south bridge support two conventional ATA100 channels but it also fully supports two Serial ATA150 channels. Intel has also released a newer version of the ICH5 south bridge, the ICH5R. It features an integrated RAID controller that utilizes the dual Serial ATA ports for high performance RAID Level 0 with a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 300MB/s. It is interesting to note that ASUS only included the ICH5R Southbridge on their Springdale board, whereas Gigabyte only included this Southbridge on their Canterwood board.