Some Intel Questions / Comments

Caecina wrote:
I believe that's
apparently the main distinguishing feature of the 925XE.

Is their an official launch date for this?

DDR2 + 925XE = intended for eachother? Will a 925XE chipset be more
suitable for DDR2 memory?

No, DDR2 was intended for 925X not XE. I doubt that it will be more or less
suitable for DDR2 memory.

Yousuf Khan

No, DDR2 was intended for 925X not XE. I doubt that it will be more or less
suitable for DDR2 memory.

It'd be nice if Intel had an official launch date for the 925XE chipset.
Lately, it seems they've hit a wall with the Pentium 4.

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message
...
Caecina wrote:
Wait for the 925XE so that you get the 1 GHz motherboard support
which will be the standard by next year.

Is that what's coming in November, and why the current generation
processors are continually (rather quickly) dropping in price? It
certainly makes sense to wait, then. I appreciate the information.

The new developments on the horizon from Intel are being phased in
increments continuously. Just back in August, Intel introduced two new
chipsets (the 915- and 925-series) which supports the new DDR2 memory, and
the new PCI-Express plugin cards. In November, it looks like Intel will
introduce a new faster front-side bus (going from 800Mhz to 1024Mhz).

Now how many of them are worth waiting for? I'd say the PCI-e is worth it
for the next generation of video cards, although it doesn't show much
speed
improvement over existing AGP video cards. Also note that Nvidia and ATI
are
both expected to introduce a feature into their gaming video cards (called
within Nvidia circles as SLI, i.e. Scan Line Interleaving; called
something
else by ATI). This is a feature that allows you to put two identical video
cards into the system, and they will cooperate with one another to display
the scene together. Ideally, this requires that you have two of the
highest
speed PCI-e slots known as the X16 slots on your system. I don't think any
of the motherboards and chipsets currently being introduced for either
Intel
or AMD platforms have these dual-X16 PCI-e slots. These *will* be the
highest performance 3D gaming platform features. The reason this will
become
popular is because both Intel and AMD platforms will support PCI-e very
quickly. However, with PCI-e you not only have to see if the platform you
buy supports PCI-e, but also whether it supports dual PCI-e X16 for the
gaming.

As for the DDR2 memory and the higher FSB speed coming out. I don't think
they will be nearly as important, nor will they gain popularity quite as
quickly. DDR2 memory is actually *slower* than the older DDR memory right
now. They aren't expected to be much better for another two or three speed
increments. DDR2 will only be supported by AMD platforms only after it's
been shown that DDR2 has finally overtaken DDR for speed, so until then
you'll be subsidizing DDR2 research by buying it for your Intel platform,
and not getting much performance for it.


DDR2-667 is much faster than DDR-400. That's a fact. This is why they are
moving to DDR2... much higher bandwidth potential. By the way, they are
already at DDR2-800.

"Caecina" wrote in message
...
No, DDR2 was intended for 925X not XE. I doubt that it will be more or
less
suitable for DDR2 memory.

It'd be nice if Intel had an official launch date for the 925XE chipset.
Lately, it seems they've hit a wall with the Pentium 4.

I've heard November 6th and it's definitely worth waiting for. Unofficial
benchmarks have shown a marked improvement with 1GHz bus and DDR2-667.
Unless you run little benchmarks that fit within the cache, you would
definitely see quite the speed jump. It's a 20% jump just in bandwidth
alone. Also, the new chips are supposed to have 2 MB L2 caches. We shall
see, but this sounds like a significant performance boost. Of course, not
all benchmarks will show it, but it would be a tremendous boost in overall
system efficiency and performance.

I've heard November 6th and it's definitely worth waiting for. Unofficial
benchmarks have shown a marked improvement with 1GHz bus and DDR2-667.

Will it be widely available? Or, will it be like the 3.6 GHz and current 2MB
cache? (rare, and expensive) Are the new (1066) bus speeds going to accompany
only 3.6 GHz and up?

Judd wrote:
DDR2-667 is much faster than DDR-400. That's a fact. This is why
they are moving to DDR2... much higher bandwidth potential. By the
way, they are already at DDR2-800.

Don't see any listings of DDR2-800 on Pricewatch yet. But you can see some
PC4200 DDR-533 for sale.

Yousuf Khan